"You can't frighten me," I said, in response to the strange fear he had inspired. "No one can frighten me now." A sense of my inaccessibility was the first taste of an achieved triumph. I had done with fear. The poor devil before me appeared infinitely remote. He was lost; but he was only one of the lost; one of those that I could see already overwhelmed by the rush from the flood-gates opened at my touch. He would be destroyed in good company; swept out of my sight together with the past they had known and with the future they had waited for. But he was odious. "I am done with you," I said. "Eh; what?... Who wants to frighten?... I wanted to know what's your pet vice.... Won't tell? You might safely--I'm off.... No.... Want to tell me mine?... No time.... I'm off.... Ask the policeman ... crossing sweeper will do.... I'm going." "You will have to," I said. "What.... Dismiss me?... Throw the indispensable Soane overboard like a squeezed lemon?... Would you?... What would Fox say?... Eh? But you can't, my boy--not you. Tell you ... tell you ... can't.... Beforehand with you ... sick of it.... I'm off ... to the Islands--the Islands of the Blest.... I'm going to be an ... no, not an angel like Fox ... an ... oh, a beachcomber. Lie on white sand, in the sun ... blue sky and palm-trees--eh?... S.S. Waikato. I'm off.... Come too ... lark ... dismiss yourself out of all this. Warm sand, warm, mind you ... you won't?" He had an injured expression. "Well, I'm off. See me into the cab, old chap, you're a decent fellow after all ... not one of these beggars who would sell their best friend ... for a little money ... or some woman. Will see the last of me...." I didn't believe he would reach the South Seas, but I went downstairs and watched him march up the street with a slight stagger under the pallid dawn. I suppose it was the lingering chill of the night that made me shiver. I felt unbounded confidence in the future, there was nothing now between her and me. The echo of my footsteps on the flagstones accompanied me, filling the empty earth with the sound of my progress. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN