The word broke from him again, a pitiful, despairing sob, and then he lay there, long, dry sobs shaking him from head to foot as that bitterest of all waves, the unavailing realisation of what might have been contrasted with what is, swept over him and overwhelmed him. The reality, touched into life by her letter as though Clemence’s voice had spoken to him, which he had thrown away; the reality on which, in doing so, he had hurled himself; stood out before him in pitiless distinctness; and in his ignorance and blindness, in his utter want of comprehension of the moral aspect of his acts and the stern justice of the retribution he was meeting, there was no light or cohesion for him anywhere in the world, and darkness and chaos had closed about him. Nearly an hour passed before he moved, and lifted a white, haggard face, marred with the agony of impotent regret. He looked about him vaguely, pushing his hair back heavily from his forehead, and as his eye fell upon the travelling-bag that instinctive sense of the necessity upon him, which had stirred him with no consciousness on his part, deepened into a mechanically active impulse. He must go. He paused a moment, and then he drew out a fresh sheet of paper. “Falconer!” he muttered. “Falconer will see to them. There’s no one else!” It was as though the fire through which he was passing had burnt away from him all recollection, even, of his mother. He had thought of her for long only as the source of all that was unpleasant in his life. Now in the sharpness of his pain a haze had spread itself over the past, and all thought of the means by which the present position had been brought about was obliterated. He wrote for a few minutes, rapidly, desperately, in a handwriting which was hardly legible; then he thrust the letter into an envelope, which he directed to Dennis Falconer; and rose. His original intention of writing to Clemence had left him. It had become an impossibility. And side by side with his sense of his utter incapacity to find any words in which to speak to her, there had risen in him a heart-broken impulse to see her face once more and for the last time.