That two-edged dart must have been finely tempered that it never seemed to blunt! The dormant life in that higher part of him, to which it had penetrated, must have been life indeed, that it should throb and quiver stronger and stronger, side by side with all that was lowest and worst in him, making the struggle grow always fiercer, and goading him on and on. The dart owed its edge, the life its growing sensitiveness, to a touch which lay always on Julian’s consciousness, haunting him night and day. Not to be driven away or obliterated; not to be crowded out of his soul by any stress of evil passion; a white light on the soiled, tangled web of his life, which shone steadily in the strength of a power no struggle of his could touch; was the thought of Clemence. Clemence, who had trusted him; Clemence, hoping, longing, loving him, as he knew in every wretched fibre; Clemence, for whose presence he longed at times with a heart-sickness of longing which reacted in a very orgy of passionate bitterness. He had received a note from her a few days after her disappearance, telling him in a few simple words that she had got work; that she relied on him not to drive her out of it by trying to see her, until he “was ready,” as she phrased it. Again and again a reckless impulse to see her, and force his will upon her, had seized him, but something had always held him back. Again and again he had sent her money, always to have it returned to him with a little line of hope or patience. In the reception of those notes; in the writhing love, and longing, and shame they stirred in him, the dart went home and tortured him indeed. He crushed the sheet of common note-paper almost fiercely in his hand now, and thrust it away to the back of the drawer from which it had come. He caught up the paper which had fallen from it--the cheque he had sent her three days before--and tore it savagely into fragments. Then he swept the papers on which he had been busy unheedingly into a drawer, locked it sharply, and rose, white to the very lips. “It can’t be long now,” he muttered. “It shan’t be! Men make their piles in a day--in an hour; why should not I? It shan’t be long!” He stood for a moment, his hand clenched, his features compressed, his eyes full of a sullen fire. Then he turned sharply away and left the room. There was no trace of any fire about him, however, except the harmless irradiation of youth and good spirits, when he opened the door of his mother’s drawing-room a few minutes before their dinner-hour. He had spent the intervening hour at his club, the most lightly good-natured, and thoroughly easy-going and irresponsible young man there, and there was precisely the same character about him now as he crossed the room to his mother. CHAPTER XIII