On that same day he did write a letter to Fisher, and he wrote also to Cradell.  As to those letters he felt no difficulty.  To Fisher he declared his belief that Cradell was innocent as he was himself as regarded Mrs Lupex.  “I don’t think he is the sort of man to make up to a married woman,” he said, somewhat to Cradell’s displeasure, when the letter reached the Income-tax Office; for that gentleman was not averse to the reputation for success in love which the little adventure was, as he thought, calculated to give him among his brother clerks.  At the first bursting of the shell, when that desperately jealous man was raging in the parlour, incensed by the fumes both of wine and love, Cradell had felt that the affair was disagreeably painful.  But on the morning of the third day,—­for he had passed two nights on his friend Fisher’s sofa,—­he had begun to be somewhat proud of it, and did not dislike to hear Mrs Lupex’s name in the mouths of the other clerks.  When, therefore, Fisher read to him the letter from Guestwick, he hardly was pleased with his friend’s tone.  “Ha, ha, ha,” said he, laughing.  “That’s just what I wanted him to say.  Make up to a married woman, indeed.  No; I’m the last man in London to do that sort of thing.”

“Upon my word, Caudle, I think you are,” said Fisher; “the very last man.”

And then poor Cradell was not happy.  On that afternoon he boldly went to Burton Crescent, and ate his dinner there.  Neither Mr nor Mrs Lupex were to be seen, nor were their names mentioned to him by Mrs Roper.  In the course of the evening he did pluck up courage to ask Miss Spruce where they were; but that ancient lady merely shook her head solemnly, and declared that she knew nothing about such goings on;—­no, not she.

But what was John Eames to do as to that letter from Amelia Roper?  He felt that any answer to it would be very dangerous, and yet that he could not safely leave it unanswered.  He walked off by himself across Guestwick Common, and through the woods of Guestwick Manor, up by the big avenue of elms in Lord De Guest’s park, trying to resolve how he might rescue himself from this scrape.  Here, over the same ground, he had wandered scores of times in his earlier years, when he knew nothing beyond the innocence of his country home, thinking of Lily Dale, and swearing to himself that she should be his wife.  Here he had strung together his rhymes, and fed his ambition with high hopes, building gorgeous castles in the air, in all of which Lilian reigned as a queen; and though in those days he had known himself to be awkward, poor, uncared for by any in the world except his mother and his sister, yet he had been happy in his hopes,—­happy in his hopes, even though he had never taught himself really to believe that they would be realised.  But now there was nothing in his hopes or thoughts to make him happy.  Everything was black, and wretched, and ruinous.  What would it matter, after all, even if he should marry Amelia Roper, seeing that Lily was to be given to another?  But then the idea of Amelia as he had seen her that night through the chink in the door came upon his memory, and he confessed to himself that life with such a wife as that would be a living death.