Such a longing, in various forms and degrees, had shaken and torn him often before, but hitherto something--some influence from Clemence’s own words, some jarring and throbbing of that better nature in himself--had held him back. But now, strung up and carried out of himself by his excitement, he was impervious to all considerations save that of his own overmastering craving. The end was very near now, he told himself. It was a question of a week or two only. He must see her; she herself would see that it was only reasonable that he should see her! His plans were laid in the passing of a few seconds. The only address Clemence had given him was that of the house of business where she worked--where she had worked when he met her first--his only chance of seeing her lay in meeting her when she left her work at night. He would not go home to dinner, he decided; he would telegraph to his mother, and dine at a quiet restaurant. That would bring him, as he knew well enough, to the earliest hour at which the “hands,” of whom Clemence made one, were likely to be released, and he would wait in the little by-street in which the “hands’” entrance was situated until she came. He went out of the room with a quick, assured step, sent off his telegram--a brief “Detained. Inconsolable”--from an office in Fleet Street, and then, carefully avoiding the fashionable resorts, he walked to the restaurant he had mentally selected. The little street which, for some scores of men and women, formed the picture evoked by a name which, for the shopping population of London, involved a mental vision of a busy thoroughfare and a considerable expanse of plate-glass windows, ran parallel to that thoroughfare, divided from it only by a long block of buildings; and bearing in mind the slight nature of the division between the two, the contrast presented was almost startling. The little street was a thoroughfare inasmuch as it led from one side-street to another; but these streets were very little frequented, and the connecting-link between them was a short cut to nowhere. It represented simply so many back entrances to places of business, and these being to a great extent monopolised by a single firm, the comings and goings at stated times of the hands employed by that firm was often the only movement that broke the quiet from morning until night. In the intervals between these comings and goings there brooded over the street such a silence and stillness as seemed strangely incompatible with the thought of all the labour and effort that it held; with the hard day’s work towards which those coming footsteps in the morning were bent; with the hard day’s work which lay behind those departing footsteps in the evening. The street itself had a squalid, neglected look, too, as though life and activity had passed it by.