I thought for a moment that he meant the Major, and was breaking into an angry remonstrance, when I saw that he meant something quite different. It was always his strongest point, this extraordinary consciousness of right, this unwavering belief that he had to do and therefore could do certain things. Without this, I know that he never wrote a line, and in my heart I believe this was the cause of his success. “Then you are not writing at all?” I asked. “Yes, I write generally for a couple of hours before breakfast,” he said. And that evening we sat by his gas stove and he read me the next four chapters of ‘Lynwood.’ He had rather a dismal lodging-house bedroom, with faded wall-paper and a prosaic snuff-coloured carpet. On a rickety table in the window was his desk, and a portfolio full of blue foolscap, but he had done what he could to make the place habitable; his Oxford pictures were on the walls--Hoffman’s ‘Christ speaking to the Woman taken in Adultery,’ hanging over the mantelpiece--it had always been a favourite of his. I remember that, as he read the description of Lynwood and his wife, I kept looking from him to the Christ in the picture till I could almost have fancied that each face bore the same expression. Had this strange monotonous life with that old brute of a Major brought him some new perception of those words, “Neither do I condemn thee”? But when he stopped reading, I, true to my character, forgot his affairs in my own, as we sat talking far into the night--talking of that luckless month at Mondisfield, of all the problems it had opened up, and of my wretchedness. “You were in town all September?” he asked; “you gave up Blachington?” “Yes,” I replied. “What did I care for country houses in such a mood as that.” He acquiesced, and I went on talking of my grievances, and it was not till I was in the train on my way back to London that I remembered how a look of disappointment had passed over his face just at the moment. Evidently he had counted on learning something about Freda from me, and I--well, I had clean forgotten both her existence and his passionate love.