BYRON. That Sunday night was not one of London's black nights that have been so often described. The police began to be a little sharp with the people after nine or ten o'clock, and by midnight the streets were getting tolerably clear. For the great majority, I believe it had been a day of more or less pleasurable excitement and amusement. For the minority, who were better informed, it was a day and night of curious bewilderment and restless anxiety. I looked in at several newspaper offices on my way home from South Kensington, but found that subordinate members of the staffs had no information to give, and that their superiors maintained an attitude of strict reticence. As I passed the dark windows of my own office I thought of our "feature" for the coming week: the demand for disarmament, in order that naval and military expenditure might be diverted into labour reform channels; Herr Mitmann's voluble assurances of the friendliness of the German people; of the ability and will of the German Socialists to make German aggression impossible, for the sake of their brother workers in England. I thought of these things, and wished I could spurn under foot my connection with _The Mass_. Then, sitting at the window of my little bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, I looked into my petty finances. If I left Clement Blaine I had enough to subsist upon for six or eight weeks. It was a risky business. Then I pictured myself casually mentioning to Constance Grey that I was no longer connected with _The Mass_. I fancied that I saw the bright approval in her eyes. Before blowing my light out, I had composed the little speech to Blaine which, in the morning, should set a period to our connection. And then I thought of Beatrice. It was barely twenty-four hours since we had parted beside Battersea Park (though it seemed more like twenty-four days), and recollection showed me Beatrice in her rather rumpled finery, with the bleakness of the gray hour that follows such pleasures as most appealed to her, beginning to steal over her handsome face, sapping its warm colour, thinning and sharpening its ripe, smooth contours. Beatrice would pout when she heard of my leaving her father. The thought showed me her full red lips, and the little even white teeth they so often disclosed. The curves of Beatrice's mouth were of a kind that have twisted many men's lives awry; and those men have thought straightness well lost for such red lips. Yes, Beatrice was good to look upon. She had a way of throwing her head back, and showing the smooth, round whiteness of her throat when she laughed, that had thrilled me time and again. And how often, and how gaily she laughed.