“Julian, for my sake, for your wife’s sake, dear! I love you so! I--I need you so! Don’t part us any longer! If it was for your good, if it was to make you happy, there’s nothing I would not face, and face cheerfully--ah, you know that, don’t you? But you’re doing wrong, and I think of it always, and it makes the loneliness so that I can’t bear it. Oh, I can’t bear it!” She broke suddenly into low shuddering sobs and tears, and her head fell forward helplessly on to his breast, though she still kept her convulsive hold upon his arm. He put his other arm round her and drew her towards him, and as he did so he seemed to realise with a kind of double consciousness the course he would take and its utter contemptibility. “Don’t, Clemmie dear! Don’t! don’t!” he said in a broken, uneven voice. “It’s all right, dear! I’m going to do it! I came to tell you so! It’s all right!” “You’re going to--tell her?” “I am, Clemence! I promise you I am! Only--only not for a week or two. There’s--there’s something I must wait for!” “But you are going to? You are? You are?” “On my--on my soul, yes, Clemence!” There was a moment’s silence, broken only by her low, tremulous sobs; then these too died away. At last, with a long sighing breath, she raised herself and looked into his pale, miserable face, with her own quiet and exhausted. “Must you wait?” she said, with an indescribable accent on the first bitter word. “Must you?” “I--I must, dear!” he said desperately, his eyes trying wretchedly to avoid hers. “It shan’t be long, I promise you; but I must wait just a little longer!” She paused a moment, still looking into his face. Then, with a sudden light in her eyes, she made a slight movement as though she would have bent his head down that she might murmur in his ear. She stopped herself, however, and there settled down upon her face a look of unutterable sadness. By Julian, in his helpless misery of self-contempt, the gesture had passed utterly unheeded. “Don’t let it be much longer, dear!” she said. “Good night!” Julian caught at the last word as though it gave him some sort of chance of restoring his writhing self-respect. “Good night!” he echoed. “Not yet, Clemence! I’m going to see you home, of course!” But Clemence shook her head. “No!” she said steadfastly, “no, dear!” Something in her tone, something in the touch she laid upon him, took from him all power of self-assertion, all power of resistance to her will. She drew his head towards her now, kissed him softly on the forehead, and then turned and went away down the street, leaving him alone. CHAPTER III “Romayne, at last! By Jove, old man, we thought you were going to throw us over!”