“Come along,” said I hoarsely to Gerry in a voice that I hardly knew myself, and blundered out of the room. Without another word I crept into the hansom the commissionaire called, and together we drove down the glaring streets to my rooms, Gerry offering no sympathy but a silence which I understood and was grateful for. You know the heavy, choking pain that lies leaden in your throat when one you love has gone out into the emptiness—the desperate unbelief in your torture—the mad hope that insists that this thing is too horrible to bear. My suffering came home to me like that. I could only think of Gwen as of one dead and gone from me, but with the added agony of knowing that to me she might have been life and love itself. I felt that I could beat the air, wrestling with my fate for my desire. I gasped, unmanned with wretchedness. Then Gerry rose and put his hand upon my shoulder. Here again his selfishness was seven years younger than mine. He could lose his sorrow in sympathy. “God be good to you, dear old chap,” he said; “it’s desperate, desperate luck, but after all _is_ it too late? You’ve the place, the title, and all that—and after all, you know, the old boy might have come home and married any day—why can’t you follow them? Surely you might drop in with them somewhere.” “Too late? Of course it’s too late,” said I bitterly. “Is a girl to wait for ever? Besides, they can’t hear of it for weeks—very likely not at all. By then Denvarre will have settled matters, if he isn’t the most consummate idiot on earth.” “That may be all very well about Denvarre,” quoth Gerry wisely, “though I don’t see that it is for certain, all the same. But what about Gwen? You don’t allow her much independence of thought. Why should he happen to meet her fancy? Do you think she doesn’t _know_ you worship the ground she walks on?” I stared at him, gnawing uneasily at my moustache, and with the sense that he spoke the truth. Gwen knew it—must know it, but she must have seen, as did I, the hopelessness of the business—must have known that the farewell of that morning was to be the end. And yet—and yet that look she gave me. Was it merely questioning, or did it tell me something? I fell into that moody, unhealthy mind when one forbids oneself to hope for very hope of being mistaken—assuring myself that I knew there could be nothing but despair for me in the future, trusting all the same that wanton fate would prove me wrong. Which is a phase of unreason, I take it, more wearing than an utter yielding to desperation.