He found her in much the same mood as his own, tired and resigned. She did not complain or accuse any one at all. But she seemed aching with dull resentment at the inevitable, friendless future, hating it and fearing it. She told him directly that she was not to have an operation. Dr. Schottman had warned that in her case it meant an exceptional risk. Her health was not good and having the baby would put her in fine shape.... Potter felt the sting of a lash in every word she uttered. He burst out at last. “Ellen, you must marry me. You must. There’s no other way out.” She did not laugh at him, but she simply refused to heed him. If she had consented he would have felt in that moment infinitely happier; and for even a ray of light in his present darkness, he would have abandoned a great many of the future’s promises. “But what will you do?” “Dr. Schottman has arranged everything for me. He’s to take me to a hospital in a few weeks. I could wait a month or two longer, I suppose, without their knowing it, but I might as well go. At the hospital I’ll have to work, until my time. Then he’s fixed it with some people for me to stay. They won’t mind anything. He’s told them all about me. They’re patients of his, nice people and well off. The Meadowburns will never know anything, they’ll never see me again. Not even the doctor knows about you and nobody will if you keep still. I’m just to walk out and disappear.” Potter stumbled down the stairway of the pretentious new Meadowburn house in a daze of misery and meanness. Nightfall found him lying face downward in the dried leaves of the park where the woods were thickest. He might have built his house there and never have been discovered for a generation. He might have become like “Clothes-pole Tom,” a hermit hero of his childhood, and sold gopher skins for a living. Some such method of losing himself would have been sweet.... But youth walks forward even though it harbours corroding secrets. He could not escape the vision of Ellen in a hospital uniform, worn and broken-spirited, carrying heavy buckets of dirty water and swabbing down floors with a mop. He went back to college, lifeless and desperate, whipping himself into work with torturing thoughts. By January even his family saw something was wrong, and his father, who saw farthest, told him to make his own plans, to leave school and go where he liked. After a week of dismal idleness at home there followed a telegraphic correspondence with Roget. The two started off together to New York. Three years later, crossing the Atlantic to Paris, Osprey still had not returned to his native city, and he repeated his oath never to go back there again if it could be avoided. VI