but never available and never to be found. Gran "hoped nothing was wrong, dear;" but erased her suspicion with her pen, but not so well that he could not read the words and picture the troubled thoughts that wrote them. Ah! this was that grisly Unforeseen in shape new and most monstrous. How meet it? How meet it? Just as he had shrunk from announcing his intention of marriage because of the clatter of tongues and the opposition that it would loose upon him, so now, but a thousand, thousand times more, he shrank from the clatter that divulgement of his secret would cause; from the resentment of his world at its befoolment by him (as they would feel it); from the sneers and laughter at his turpitude; from the apologies with which he must go round on his knees to those he had deceived; from the interminable explanations he must make. The Unforeseen in shape most monstrous! It rushed him as a host of savage beasts that had snarled, that had threatened, that had come at him singly and torn him but been whipped, but that now was on him in the pack. How meet it? How meet it? God! What a lightsome, harmless, innocent, mad, wanton, reckless thing he had done, and what a turmoil he had loosed! Bitter days, these, in the Knightsbridge flat. That pamphlet of "I love" all connoted now, written in tears, with what "I love" demands, where leads and must be paid. CHAPTER III A LOVERS' LITANY I Bitter days--but suddenly breaking to dawn. There came to him, on the rack of this torment, a thought that tortured him anew, yet made for healing. Audrey? Even if, as in his extremity he debated, he dared all and defied all--snatched himself out of this hell by publishing his position and crying to all concerned, "Now do and say your worst!"--even if he so made an end of it, to what would he bring her? How would she be received, suddenly proclaimed his wife when this ugly crop of suspicion and gossip was at its height? He knew, or through his distraught imagination he believed he knew; and he writhed to picture her--his gentle, unversed Audrey--thus introduced to the suspicious, uncharitable, malicious atmosphere that well he was aware his world could breathe. "Comes from a post-office somewhere, or a shop was it? Married at such and such a date--_so he says!_" Thus the gate was slammed anew upon his resolution and locked and double-locked: the way must somehow be prepared for Audrey, the gossip by some means made to die, before he declared her. And with that there was unlocked and opened wide the gate that had barred up his love. Imagining the world's treatment of her, he realised his own.