“Well, I buried him up there, and may I be hanged if I don’t think the man was better and more happily buried in the place he had loved, than stuck down in a corner of some unfriendly cemetery he had never seen. For myself—such is the egoism of our nature—I was thinking all the while that I would leave behind me a written request to be buried within sight of Westmacott’s farm in Kent. And after I had buried him, and had got rid of Marco and the two men over a bottle of _raki_ in the kitchen, I took all the flowers from my garden and put them on his grave, and I dug up some roots of orchid and cyclamen and planted them at his head and at his feet; but I don’t suppose they ever survived the move, and probably to this day the tourists who wander far enough afield to stumble over the mound, say, ‘Why, some one has buried his dog out here.’ * * * * * “A week later I was in London, on a blazing August day which seemed strangely misty to me, accustomed as I was to the direct, unmitigated rays of the sun on the Ephesian hills. I still hadn’t thought about my future, and I was resolved not to do so until, my interview with Mrs. MacPherson over, I could look upon the whole of the last ten years as an episode of the past. I had tried to forget that I was in the same country as Ruth; but this had been difficult, for the train from Dover had carried me through the heart of Ruth’s own county, a cruel, unforeseen prank of fortune; I had pulled down the blinds of my railway carriage, greatly to the annoyance of my fellow-travellers, but these good people, who might have been involved with Fate in a conspiracy against me, had their unwitting revenge and defeated my object utterly by saying, as we flashed through a station, ‘That was Hildenborough; now we have to go through a long tunnel.’ “Hildenborough! After ten years, during which I had consistently kept at least fifteen hundred miles between us, I was at last within two miles of her home. I nearly sprang out of the train at the thought. But I resolutely put it away, so resolutely that I found myself pushing with my hands and with all my force against the side of the railway carriage. “It was too late, when I reached London, to do anything that day. I slept at my old club, where everybody started at the sight of me as of a ghost, and the following morning I went to the address MacPherson had given me. It was in a block of flats, a long way up. I was left stranded upon the tiny landing by the lift-boy, who, with his lift, fell rapidly down through the floor as though pulled from below by a giant’s hand. I rang the bell. It tinkled loudly; I heard voices within, and presently a woman came to open the door, with an expression of displeased inquiry on her face; a middle-aged woman, wearing a dingy yellow dressing-gown which she kept gathering together in her hand as though afraid that it would fall open. “‘Can I see Mrs. MacPherson?’ I asked. “She stared at me.