Stuart took a step towards the door of the room. She sprang to her feet and got in front of him, clinging round him to prevent his going. The scene became dreadful and ugly. He had to struggle step by step out of the room and into the hall. It was a fight to get his hat off the stand and put it on. He felt that it was imperative that he should get away there and then. Another hour spent with Molly would be irretrievable dishonour. At the front-door the miserable woman made a still more frantic struggle. He had to unclasp her fingers by main force, and to thrust her back with one hand while he turned the latch with the other. If he had not promptly slipped his foot in between door and doorpost she would have slammed the door to again before he could open it. And all the time she kept up an incessant wailing appeal to him for mercy. For the first time in his life Alistair felt that he was doing a cruel thing. He was still shuddering from the sound of Molly’s last moan as he got into a cab at the street-corner and gave the direction: “Colonsay House.” CHAPTER XV MAGIC CASEMENTS LORD ALISTAIR stood on the deck of a Channel steamer and watched the coast of England melt into the night. His mood was burthened with that indignant melancholy which swelled the heart of Byron and of Whistler, and many another exile whom the builders of the Raj have rejected from their midst. In the Tate Gallery hangs a painting which he had often gazed upon, a symbolic masterpiece of Watts’. It represents hard-heartedness sitting crowned with gold and robed in scarlet on the throne of the world. The painter has called his figure “Mammon”; it came before Alistair just then as the image of England--the England that stones her prophets and worships her swindlers; the England that made Burns a gauger and one Perceval Prime Minister; that chained the dying Napoleon on an ocean rock, and rejected the last prayer of Nelson; England, with her shop-keeper’s conscience, where art is a sin and generosity a crime. A sense of exultation and relief accompanied his thoughts. He was escaping from the Puritan prison against whose bars his spirit had so often bruised its wings. In the obtuse self-satisfaction, in the unctuous mercy, of its keepers he had felt something more merciless than in all the recorded cruelties of furious saints and frantic Emperors. Not the snow-peaks of Switzerland, he told himself, not the Shakespearean cadences of Venice, nor Rome with her memories and marbles, afforded that zest to wandering which greets us like a scent on foreign soil. It was the sense of freedom from that chain of custom and convention which we forge upon ourselves. The Mediterranean filled her coasts with pleasure cities which were cities of refuge from the middle class. The Niagara of gold that poured from England was the price the English tradesman pays for his vindictive respectability. It was the tax on spite.