that some secret shame was harassing his mind.  He himself, indeed, would have used no other word to describe the ill under which he suffered.  Looking back on that strange episode of his life which began with his introduction to Mrs. Toplady and ended in the park at Rivenoak, he was stung almost beyond endurance by a sense of ignominious folly.  On his lonely walks, and in the silence of sleepless nights, he often gesticulated and groaned like a man in pain.  His nerves became so shaken that at times he could hardly raise a glass or cup to his lips without spilling the contents.  Poverty and loneliness be had known, and had learnt to bear them with equanimity; for the first time he was tasting humiliation.

Incessantly be reviewed the stages of his foolishness and, as be deemed it, of his dishonour.  But he had lost the power to understand that phantasm of himself which pranked so grotesquely in the retrospect.  Was it true that he had reasoned and taken deliberate step after step in the wooing of Lady Ogram’s niece?  Might he not urge in his excuse, to cloak him from his own and the world’s contempt, some unsuspected calenture, for which, had he known, he ought to have taken medical advice?  When, in self-chastisement, he tried to summon before his mind’s eye the image of May Tomalin, he found it quite impossible; the face no longer existed for him; the voice was as utterly forgotten as any he might have chanced to hear for a few minutes on that fatal evening in Pont Street.  And this was what he had seen as an object of romantic tenderness—­this vaporous nothing, this glimmer in a dazed eye!

Calm moments brought a saner self-reproach.  “I simply yielded to the common man’s common temptation.  I am poor, and it was wealth that dazzled and lured me.  Pride would explain more subtly; that is but a new ground of shame.  I felt a prey to the vulgarest and basest passion; better to burn that truth into my mind, and to make the brand a lifelong warning.  I shall the sooner lift up my head again.”

He seemed to palliate his act by remembering that he wished to benefit his sisters.  Neither of them—­the poor dead girl, and she who lived only for self-forgetfulness—­would have been happier at the cost of his disgrace.  How well it was, indeed, that he had been saved from that debasement in their eyes.

He lived on in the silent house, quite alone and desiring no companionship.  Few letters came for him, and he rarely saw a newspaper.  After a while he was able to forget himself in the reading of books which tranquillised his thought, and held him far from the noises of the passing world.  So sequestered was the grey old house that he could go forth when he chose into lanes and meadows without fear of encountering anyone who would disturb his meditation and his enjoyment of nature’s beauty.  Through the mellow days of the declining summer, he lived amid trees and flowers, slowly recovering health and peace in places where a bird’s note, or the ripple of a stream, or the sighing of the wind, were the only sounds under the ever-changing sky.