He looked back upon London with a great shuddering. The torment that he had suffered there he must never undergo again. Norah was now the one friend left to him in the world. He would cut himself into pieces to make these last days of hers happy, and yet the one thing that could give her happiness was that he should promise to go back. She did not understand--no one could understand--the way that this place, this life that he contemplated, pulled him. The slackness of it, the lack of discipline in it, the absence of struggle in it. All the strength, the fighting that had been in him during these past years, was driven out of him now. He just wanted to let things drift--to wander about the fields and roads, to find his clothes growing shabby upon him, to grow old without knowing even that he was alive--all this had come to him. She, on the other side, would drive him back into the battle of it all once more. To go back a failure--to be pointed out as the man whose wife left him because she found him so dull--to hear men like young Percival Galleon laughing at his book--to sell his soul for journalism in order to make a living--to see, perhaps, Clare come back into the London world--to break out, ultimately, when he was sick and tired of it all, into every kind of debauch ... how much better to slip into nothing down here where nobody knew nor cared! And yet, on the other hand, he had never known until now the importance that Norah Monogue had held in his life. Always, in everything he had done, in his ambitions and despairs, his triumphs and defeats, she had been behind him. He'd just do anything in the world for her!--anything except this one thing. Up and down, up and down he paced the little Minstrels' room, with its dusty green chair and its shining floor--“I just can't stand it all over again!” But every time that he went in to see her--and he was with her continually--made his resistance harder. She didn't speak about it again but he knew that she was always thinking about it. “She's worrying over something, Westcott--do you happen to know what it is?” the doctor asked him. “It's bad for her. If you can help her about it in any way--” The strain between them was becoming unbearable. Every day, when he went in to sit with her, they would talk about other things--about everything--but he knew that before her eyes there was that picture of himself up at Scaw House, and of the years passing--and his soul and everything that was fine in him, dying. He saw her growing daily weaker. Sometimes he felt that he must run away altogether, go up to Scaw House and leave her to die alone; then he knew that that cruelty at any rate was not in him. One day he thought her brutal and interfering, another day it seemed that it was he who was the tyrant. He reminded himself of all the things that she had done for him--all the things, and he could not grant her this one request.