“Gone away?” asked Goddard, looking at him blankly. “Where to?” “Ah, that I cannot say,” said the porter. And then he added, with the benevolent smile of his class-- “Perhaps you have not heard, sir, that there is no longer such a person as Lady Phayre.” “What?” cried Goddard. “What do you mean?” “Only that Madame was married this morning. It was to a Monsieur Gleam. I believe he is a member of Parliament. He has been staying in the hotel.” Goddard stared at him with a ghastly face. He turned slowly and went down the hotel steps. He staggered a few yards. Then the sea, and the trees, and the great white palaces mingled together in a whirling circle, and disappeared in the blackness of night. Something in his brain seemed to snap, and he fell an inert mass on the pavement. ***** For weeks he lay ill. He recovered to wish that he had died. Despair overwhelmed him. His crime haunted him waking and sleeping. In his bodily prostration he seemed to hear the mocking laughter of the fiend that had prompted it. With the torture of remorse was paradoxically mingled impotent anger at the cynicism of fate. His soul sickened at the futility of things. He shrank with shuddering dismay from the ordeal that lay before him. There were times when death beckoned to him with tempting hands. But men of Goddard’s stamp survive the shipwreck of their happiness. They live on, and go about the world’s work doggedly, stubbornly, blindly obeying the fighting instinct within them. The great tragedies of the soul culminate not in death, but in dragging years of life, when the grasshopper is a burden and desire fails. And such is the end of Daniel Goddard’s tragedy. He lives to-day. His name is a household word. He is the coming man, not of a party-clique, but of a nation. He has sat upon the Treasury Bench. In the next Liberal Administration he will hold Cabinet rank. He is envied, courted, flattered. The wildest ambitions of his boyhood are in course of certain fulfilment. But he has lost for ever the joy of victory; the springs of happiness are for ever closed by the one overwhelming defeat of his life. He is on the best of terms with Aloysius Gleam, and attends his wife’s dinner-parties. Between them the past has only once been referred to, and that silently. It was the first time he found himself alone with her, one evening after dinner, Gleam having been summoned from the drawing-room. Their eyes met for an embarrassing moment. Then Goddard drew the familiar letter from his pocket-book, held it out for a few seconds so as to catch her eye, and threw it into the fire. She watched it blaze, and gave two or three little nods of acknowledgment. Then, being in a comfortable chair, a bewitching costume, and a considerably relieved frame of mind, she allowed the moisture to gather in her eyes. But neither spoke until Gleam returned with a sprightly saying on his lips. He threw himself into a chair.