London excited him--the lighted shops, the smell of food and flowers and women and leather and tobacco, the sky--signs flashing from space to space, the carts and omnibuses, the shouts and cries and sudden silences, the confused life of the place so that you could never say, "_This_ is London," but could only, in retrospect say, "Ah, _that_ must have been London," and still know that you had failed to grasp its secret. The dirt and shabbiness and lack of plan and good humour and crime and indecency and priggishness--its life! Many things out of all this glory called him--racing, women, drink, the gutter one minute, the stars the next--from them all he held himself aloof because of Rachel ... and Rachel meanwhile perhaps did not care. As Christmas approached he became utterly obsessed by this one thought--that he must have a letter. His obsession had been able, during these weeks, to clutch the tighter in that he had seen nothing of Lizzie Rand. Throughout the autumn he had encountered her very seldom-- Ever since that night in the summer when he had taken her to the theatre she had avoided him, and he decided that she had been shocked at his confession about Rachel--"You never know about women--I shouldn't have thought that would have shocked her--But there it is; you never can tell." Lizzie had been very good for him; he missed her now. He would tackle her, he said, one day. Then not only with every day, but with every hour the torture grew. He avoided Christopher, because Christopher might see things. His work faded like mist from before him--He could not sleep, but lay on his back thinking of what she would say if she _did_ write, whether she were thinking of him--how she found his own silence and what she felt about it. Then he heard the astonishing news that Lizzie Rand had gone down to Seddon to stay.... At first he thought that he would write to her and beg her to find out for him all that she could as to Rachel's mind. But Lizzie's avoidance of him checked him there--if she had been shocked at his just telling her, why then she would not be likely to help him now--No, that would not be fair to Rachel.... It occurred to him then that Rachel had asked Lizzie in order that she might speak of him, have with her someone who could tell her about his daily life, and so, without breaking her word, yet be in some kind of communication with him-- Soon this became with him a certainty. It assured him that her patience was exhausted and that she would forgive, and more than forgive, a letter from him. He wrote--then in an agony would have snatched it back again, and yet was glad that the post had taken it from him. He had broken his word, and shown himself for the miserable poor creature that he was. She would never trust him again, but surely now she would write were it only to dismiss him for ever.