The man got out at Bristol. It seemed to Frederic that he had come and gone like a shadow. So little time, the emptiness of the world moving so swiftly, and through it Plymouth coming nearer and nearer to him. Plymouth appeared to him as a sort of monster, a dogging shadow that had run after him for a long time, terrifying him, to spring ahead and come to meet him. And yet it was still behind. Everything was two things, behind and in front; the contradiction made it nothing. . . . He was frozen with terror. Back, back, this way; no, that; now the other. . . . "It will have me! It will have me! Why? I am nothing. I am nothing. It doesn't believe that I am nothing. . . . No, no. There is nothing but myself, myself, myself. . . ." He drew the revolver from his pocket. "No, no. I will go back. I will go back." He sat absolutely numbed for a long time. Suddenly he thought of his wife, coldly, clearly. He saw himself in her. She was stronger than he. He must show her that he was the stronger. He thought of his father and passed into a golden stream of peace. He would go to his father. . . "I will arise and go to my father and say unto him, 'Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to be called thy son.' . . ." His father would understand as he had understood before. . . . But then he knew that all that his mother had thought of him would be sponged away from her mind, and he remembered with what bitterness she had spoken of Minna. "Too difficult," he thought. "Too many people." The train gathered speed down an incline. Faster and faster. His terror lest the journey should come to an end clutched him back into the present. He must make haste. He must be the quicker. He had dropped the revolver into his pocket again. Now he fumbled for it. It caught in the lining, and he tugged at it with feverish impatience. . . . His heart leaped on the report, which seemed to come from far away. . . . He felt nothing; less and less; out of the swiftly moving world he was sinking downward, downward, gathering speed, falling, falling into nothing. * * * In the small hours of the morning Mr. Clibran-Bell rang furiously at the bell of the house in Burdley Park. After many minutes Francis came down in his dressing-gown with a candle in his hand. Mr. Clibran-Bell stepped into the hall. "Frederic," he said, "has not been home all night. Jessie is at my house. . . . My dear friend, my dear old friend . . ." "Has . . . something happened?" "He's . . . he's at Plymouth. Dead. They found him in the train, shot in the side." Francis stood very still, his mind slowly grasping this new appalling fact. Tears trickled down his cheeks into his beard. "I shall go to Plymouth by the first train," said Mr. Clibran-Bell, "I must get at the truth for Jessie's sake." "Yes. It is very good of you."