Already he was behindhand with work that should have been done yesterday morning, and when to-day, with the envelope containing the blade in his breast-pocket, he tried to make up for lost time, he only succeeded in losing more of it. There were other distractions as well, for owing to the spring cleaning in progress in the dining-room, he sat with Phœbe in the drawing-room, and she, quite recovered from her headache, and quite undisturbed by his presence, was reeling off sheet after sheet in her big, firm handwriting of the further trials that awaited Algernon. Sometimes she looked up at him with a bright, glad smile, born of the joy of creation; but for the most part her head was bent over her work, and but a short peal of silver-bell laughter from time to time denoted the ecstasy of invention. And falling more and more behind her, Philip lumbered in her wake, with three-quarters of his mind entirely absorbed in the awful problem regarding the contents of the envelope in his breast-pocket. Suddenly, brighter than the noonday outside, an idea illuminated him, and he got up. “I shall take ten minutes’ stroll, my dear,” he said. “_Solvitur ambulando_, you know, and you have given me a difficult chapter to write!” She recalled herself with an effort to the real world. “I think I won’t come with you, darling,” she said. “I am afraid of breaking the golden thread, as you once called it. Let me see ...” and she grabbed the golden thread again. At the bottom of the garden ran a swift chalk-stream that had often figured in their joint works, and towards this Philip joyfully hurried. He picked up half a dozen pebbles from the gravel path, put them into the envelope which contained the instrument of death, tucked the flap in, and threw it into the stream. There was a slight splash, and he saw the white envelope shiningly sink through the water until it came to rest at the bottom. He returned to Phœbe with the sense that he had awoke from some strangling nightmare. For a couple of days after that Philip enjoyed the ecstasy which succeeds the removal of some haunting terror. Basking in the sunshine of security, he could look down on the dark clouds through which he had passed, and feel with thankfulness how completely (though narrowly) he had escaped the misty fringe of some trouble of the brain, the claws and teeth and pincers of a fixed idea. The simple expedient of throwing the razor-blade into the stream had entirely dispersed those clouds, and till then he had never known the sweetness and sanity of the sun. Then, with tropical rapidity, the tempest closed in upon him again.