His thought traveled back to the boarding-house.  It was there that the thing had begun.  Before that night upon the roof, the finger-posts which he had set up with such care and deliberation along the road which led towards his coveted goal, had seemed to him to point with unfaltering directness towards everything in life worthy of consideration.  To-night they were only dreary phantasms, marking time across a miserable plain.  Perhaps, after all, there had been something in his nature, some rebel thing, intolerable yet to be reckoned with, which had been first born of that fateful curiosity of his.  It had leapt up so suddenly, sprung with such scanty notice into strenuous and insistent life.  Yet what place had it there?  He must fight against it, root it out with both hands.  What was this world of intrigue, this criminal, undesirable world, to him?  His common sense forbade him altogether to dissociate Elizabeth from her friends, from her surroundings.  She was the secret of the pain which was tearing at his heartstrings, of all the excitement, the joy, the passion which had swept like a full flood across the level way of his life, which had set him drifting among the unknown seas.  Yet it was Beatrice who had brought this upon him.  If she had never left, if he had not tasted the horrors of this new loneliness, he might have been able to struggle on.  He missed her, missed her diabolically.  The other things, marvelous though they were, had been more or less like a mirage.  This world of new emotions had spread like a silken mesh over all his thoughts, over all his desires.  Beatrice had been a tangible person, restful, delightful, a real companion, his one resource against this madness.  And now she was gone, and he was powerless to get her back.  He turned his head, he looked up the road along which he had torn that night with his arms around her.  She owed him her life and she had gone!  With all a man’s inconsequence, it seemed to him as he rose heavily to his feet and started homeward, that she had repaid him with a certain amount of ingratitude, that she had left him at the one moment in his life when he needed her most.

CHAPTER XVI

AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE

The next afternoon, at half-past four, Tavernake was having tea with Beatrice in the tiny flat which she was sharing with another girl, off Kingsway.  She opened the door to him herself, and though she chattered ceaselessly, it seemed to him that she was by no means at her ease.  She installed him in the only available chair, an absurd little wicker thing many sizes too small for him, and seated herself upon the hearth-rug a few feet away.

“You have soon managed to find me out, Leonard,” she remarked.

“Yes,” he answered.  “I had to go to the stage doorkeeper for your address.”

“He hadn’t the slightest right to give it you,” she declared.