Through the City the tides of traffic were at their height; all down the Strand also there was no break or calm in the surge of vehicles, and the progress of the motor was slow and constantly interrupted. Sometimes for some fifty or a hundred yards there would be clear running, and his thoughts on the possibilities which might exist would shoot ahead also. Then came a slow down, a check, a stop, and he would tell himself that he might spare his pains in going at all. True, before now it had more than once occurred to him as conceivable that Evelyn was falling in love with Madge, but on every occasion when this happened he had whistled the thought home again, telling himself that he had no business to send it out on this sort of errand. That, however, was absolutely all the preparation he had had for this news, and he had to let it soak in, for at first it stood like a puddle after a heavy storm on the surface of his mind. This was an affair of many minutes, but as it went on he began to realise himself the utter hopelessness of this visit which Lady Ellington had recommended. They might both of them, it was possible, when they saw him, recoil from the bitter wrong they were doing, the one to his friend, the other to her accepted lover; but how could that recoil remain permanent, how could their natural human shrinking from this cruelty possibly breed the rejection of each by the other? However much he himself might suffer, though their pity for him was almost infinite, though they might even, to go to the furthest possible point, settle to part,--yet that voluntary separation, if both agreed to it, would but make each the more noble, the more admirable, to the other. Or Madge again alone, in spite of Evelyn, might say she could not go back on her already plighted troth, and express her willingness to marry him. She might go even further, she might say, and indeed feel, that it was only by keeping her word to him that she could free her own self, her own moral nature, from the sin and stain in which she had steeped it. Loyalty, affection, esteem would certainly all draw her to this, but it was impossible that in her eyes, as they looked their last on Evelyn, there should not be regret and longing and desire. Whether he ever saw it there himself or not, Philip must know it had been there, and that at the least the memory of it must always be there.