Les ames dont j’aurai besoin,

Et les étoiles sont trop loin

Je mourral dans un coin.

HOW Hugh shook off Lady Newhaven when she followed him out of the Palace he did not know. There had been some difficulty. She had spoken to him, had urged something upon him. But he had got rid of her somehow, and had found himself sitting in his bedroom at the Southminster Hotel. Anything to be alone! He had felt that was the one thing in life to attain. But now that he was alone solitude suddenly took monstrous and hideous proportions, and became a horror to flee from. He could not bear the face of a fellow creature. He could not bear this ghoul of solitude. There was no room for him between these great millstones. They pressed upon him till he felt they were crushing him to death between them. In vain he endeavoured to compose himself, to recollect himself. But exhaustion gradually did for him what he could not do for himself.

Rachel had thrown him over. He had always known she would, and — she had.

They were to have been married in a few weeks; three weeks and one day. He marked a day off every morning when he waked. He had thought of her as his wife till the thought had become part of himself. Its roots were in his inmost being. He tore it out now, and looked at it apart from himself, as a man bleeding and shuddering looks upon a dismembered limb.

The sweat broke from Hugh’s forehead. The waiting and daily parting had seemed unbearable, that short waiting of a few weeks. Now she would never be his. That long, ever-growing hunger of the heart would never be appeased. She had taken herself away, taking away with her her dear hands and her faithful eyes and the low voice, the very sound of which brought comfort and peace. They were his hands and eyes. She had given them to him. And now she had wrenched them away again, those faithful eyes had seared him with their scorn, those white hands against which he had leaned his forehead, had thrust him violently from her. He could not live without her. This was death, to be parted from her.

“I can’t, Rachel, I can’t,” said Hugh, over and over again. What was any lesser death, compared to this, compared to her contempt?

She would never come back. She despised him. She would never love him any more. He had told her that it must be a dream that she could love him, and that he should wake. And she had said it was all quite true. How sweetly she had said it. But it was a dream after all, and he had waked — in torment. Life as long as he lived would be like this moment.

“I will not bear it,” he said suddenly, with the frantic instinct of escape which makes a man climb out of a burning house over a window ledge. Far down is the pavement, quiet, impassive, deadly. But behind is the blast of the furnace. Panic staggers between the two and — jumps.

“I will not bear it,” said Hugh, tears of anguish welling up into his eyes.

He had not only lost her, but he had lost himself. That better humble earnest self had gone away with Rachel, and he was thrust back on the old false cowardly self whom since she had loved him he had abhorred. He had disowned it. He had cast it off. Now it enveloped him again like a shirt of fire, and a voice within him said, “This is the real you. You deceived yourself for a moment. But this is the real you, the liar, the coward, the traitor, who will live with you again for ever.”

“I am forsaken,” said Hugh. He repeated the words over and over again. “Forsaken. Forsaken.” And he looked round for a way of escape.

Somewhere in the back of his mind a picture hung which he had seen once and never looked at again. He turned and looked at it now, as a man turns and looks at a picture on the wall behind him.

He saw it again, the still upturned face of the little lake among its encircling trees, as he had seen it that day when he and Doll came suddenly upon it in the woods. What had it to do with him? He had escaped from it once. He understood now.

Who, that has once seen it, has ever forgotten it, the look that deep water takes when life is unbearable! “Come down to me among my tall water plants,” it says. “I am a refuge, a way of escape. This horror and nightmare of life cannot reach you in my bosom. Come down to me. I promise nothing but to lay my cool hand upon the fire in your brain, and that the world shall release its clutch upon you, the world which promises, and will not keep its promises. I will keep mine.”

Hugh’s mind wavered, as the flame of a candle wavers in a sudden draught. So had it wavered once in the fear of death, and he had yielded to that fear. So it wavered now in a greater fear, the fear of life, and he yielded to that fear.

He caught up his hat, and went out.

It was dark, and he hit against the people in the feebly lighted streets as he hurried past. How hot it was! How absu............