His passion for Katya Lascarides! He hadn’t till that moment had any doubt about it. But by then he knew it was gone; it was dead, and in place of a passion he felt only remorse. And his longing to be perpetually with Pauline Leicester--as he had told Ellida Langham--to watch her going through all her life with her perpetual tender smile, dancing, as it were, a gentle and infantile measure; this, too, he couldn’t doubt. Acute waves of emotion went through him at the thought of her--waves of emotion so acute that they communicated themselves to his physical being, so that it was as if the thought of Katya Lascarides stabbed his heart, whilst the thought of Pauline Leicester made his hands toss beneath the sheets. For, looking at the matter formally, and, as he thought, dispassionately, it had seemed to him that his plain duty was to wait for Katya Lascarides, and to give Pauline as good a time as he could. That Pauline would have this with Dudley Leicester he hadn’t had till the moment of the meeting in Regent Street the ghost of a doubt, but now ... He said: “Good God!” for he was thinking that only the Deity--if even He--could achieve the impossible, could undo what was done, could let him watch over Pauline, which was the extent of the possession of her that he thought he desired, and wait for Katya, which also was, perhaps, all that he had ever desired to do. The intolerable hours ticked on. The light shone down on him beside the bed. At the foot Peter slept, coiled up and motionless. At the head the telephone instrument, like a gleaming metal flower, with its nickel corolla and black bell, shone with reflected light. He was accustomed on mornings when he felt he needed a rest to talk to his friends from time to time, and suddenly his whole body stirred in bed. The whites of his eyes gleamed below the dark irises, his white teeth showed, and as he clasped the instrument to him he appeared, as it were, a Shylock who clutched to his breast his knife and demanded of the universe his right to the peace of mind that knowledge at least was to give him.