You may imagine that these were terrifying.... I counted them, and was unable to check my groans when, thinking I had come to the end of them, yet another sprang up, stabbing me as it were from behind. They might almost have been veritable assassins, springing out from behind the dark bushes and copses near the Vale of Health among which I wandered.... Think of them! Think of them! They, he and she, were of an age, or nearly; I seven years the senior of the elder of them. They met on three days a week at the college, met doubtless to snigger together over their "fun," only on three evenings could I see her. Her people apparently knew his; she would go down to Guildford, and my fancy might picture them, together there, taking walks, telling stories over the fire, laughing at chance resemblances at the Zoo. And all this time I should not cease for a moment to labour at that garden of my ambition above the brown mould of which not a green shoot yet showed. How (you must remember I was desperately facing the worst that could happen and not the best)--how could they help but fall in love? What would it be possible for me to do but to discover the thing after it had happened? And when it had happened, what was there then to be done? But I need not force all this upon you. You will see for yourself. Look at it, then, and tell me where you would have conceived the odds to lie--with my possibly large-planning but certainly slow-executing brain, or with them and their opportunities and luck and gifts of circumstance and nature, demolishable singly perhaps, but well-nigh invincible in the sum of them? I weighed it as I strayed and stubbled about the benighted Heath. I returned from Hampstead at three o'clock in the morning. My horror of red and green had long since been switched off, and I got into bed during the only quiet interval that noisy and populous corner ever knew. I had now balanced advantages and disadvantages together, and was recapitulating the whole. Examining, setting aside, bringing forward again to re-examine in other aspects, setting aside again, checking, dismissing, estimating--my brain worked like a ticking instrument. Clocks struck, but still I pondered; and I was as free from anger now as if it had been another, not I, who had sought the support of the railings in Mecklenburgh Square. And there dominated all my machination the single thought, that by no slip or carelessness or overlooked detail must they be made aware that I was watching them as a masked thief watches the uneasy sleeper upon the bed. V It was at Rixon Tebb & Masters' that I first began to know jealousy, or at least the image of it. I find I must say a little more about this place in which I spent my days at that time.