Though he sat for long hours at a stretch, he accomplished laborious results. His attention refused to concentrate. He was always thinking of her: the men who might be with her in his absence; the things she had said and done; the things he had said to her, and which might have been said better; her tricks of gesture and shades of intonation. Her very faults endeared themselves in retrospect He coveted the least happy of the hours he had spent in her company. For the first day he was consoled by the sight of her tin-type photograph on the desk before him. He glanced at it between sentences and felt that she was near him. But soon he made a sad discovery: it was fast fading. As the days went by he exposed it to the light more and more grudgingly. He had the superstitious fear that, if it was quite dark before she returned, his hope of winning her would be ended. He lived for the arrival of her letters. His anxiety was a repetition of what he had suffered after her departure from London. He left orders with the hotel-clerk to have them sent up to his room at once. Every time a knock sounded on his door he became breathless. They came thick and fast, funny little letters dashed off at top-speed in a round girlish handwriting and made to look longer than they were by being sprawled out over many pages. They were full of broken phrases like her speech, with dashes and dots for which he might substitute whatever tenderness his necessity demanded. Usually they began “_Dear Miester Deek_” and ended “_Yours sincerely, Desire_.” Once, in a glorious burst of expansiveness, she signed herself “_Affectionately, Desire,_” and scratched it out. He watched for the error to occur again; it was never repeated. They were the kind of letters that it was perfectly safe to leave lying about; his replies emphatically were not. He marveled at her unvarying discretion. She had a knack of reproducing the atmosphere of her environment. It was a gay, pulsating world in which she lived. Like Flora, flowers and the singing of birds sprang up where she passed. He contrasted with hers the world he had to offer; it seemed a dull place. She had the keys to Arcady. How false had been his chivalrous dream that a fate hung over her from which she must be rescued!