“I shall probably find the letter,” said Lorne mechanically, “when I go home.”

He still eyed Hesketh narrowly, as if he had somewhere concealed about him the explanation of this final bitter circumstance.  He had a desire not to leave him, to stand and parley—­to go upstairs to the office would be to plunge into the gulf.  He held back from that and leaned against the door frame, crossing his arms and looking over into the market-place for subjects to postpone Hesketh’s departure.  They talked of various matters in sight, Hesketh showing the zest of his newly determined citizenship in every observation—­the extension of the electric tramway, the pulling down of the old Fire Hall.  In one consciousness Lorne made concise and relevant remarks; in another he sat in a spinning dark world and waited for the crash.

It seemed to come when Hesketh said, preparing to go, “I’ll tell Miss Milburn I saw you.  I suppose this change in your political prospects won’t affect your professional plans in any way you’ll stick on here, at the Bar?”

It was the very shock of calamity, and for the instant he could see nothing in the night of it but one far avenue of escape, a possibility he had never thought of seriously until that moment.  The conception seemed to form itself on his lips, to be involuntary.

“I don’t know.  A college friend has been pressing me for some time to join him in Milwaukee.  He offers me plenty of work, and I am thinking seriously of closing with him.”

“Go over to the United States?  You can’t mean that!”

“Oh yes—­it’s the next best thing!”

Hesketh’s face assumed a gravity, a look of feeling and of remonstrance.  He came a step nearer and put a hand on his companion’s arm.

“Come now, Murchison,” he said, “I ask you—­is this a time to be thinking of chucking the Empire?”

Lorne moved farther into the passage with an abruptness which left his interlocutor staring.  He stood there for a moment in silence, and then turned to mount the stair with a reply which a passing dray happily prevented from reaching Hesketh’s ears.

“No, damn you,” he said.  “It’s not!”

I cannot let him finish on that uncontrolled phrase, though it will be acknowledged that his provocation was great.  Nor must we leave him in heavy captivity to the thought of oblivion in the unregarding welter of the near republic, of plunging into more strenuous activities and abandoning his ideal, in queer inverted analogy to the refuging of weak women in a convent.  We know that his ideal was strong enough to reassert itself, under a keen irony of suggestion, in the very depth of his overwhelming:  and the thing that could rise in him at that black moment may be trusted, perhaps, to reclaim his fortitude and reconsecrate his energy when these things come again into the full current of his life.  The illness that, after two or three lagging days, brought him its merciful