And all the time he was telling himself that he was a fool--an absolute fool. 'I have fallen in love with a girl I have only seen twice,' he meditated, as the train ran through the sulphurous regions underground, and he endeavoured to protect his lungs by smoking cigarette after cigarette; 'a girl who is not, and never can be, anything to me. She will make a good match some day; she must make a good match--girls of her position and looks always do; and, a year or two hence, I shall luff into some unearthly harbour abroad, and run against Pooley, who will tell me that she has done so.' Yet, all the same, he took comfort from remembering that he had not seen anybody at Mrs. Waldron's 'afternoon' who was likely to be the individual to carry her off. But, in spite of this soothing reflection, he braced himself to a stern resolution: he determined that, as already in his life he had triumphed over other things, so he would triumph now. He would triumph over this swift-flowering and still growing love; conquer it by absence from the object which inspired it; trample it down till there was nothing left of life in it. 'I have no money to keep a wife,' he thought, as he walked up from Charing Cross Station to his hotel; 'certainly no money to keep such a wife as she would be. And, even if I had, it is not likely that she would marry me; "a common mate," as I have heard ourselves called. Portsmouth shall end it,' he concluded. 'I'll have one good week there, and then to sea again on a long cruise. That ought to do it! I'll go down to the docks to-morrow and see what's open.' Wherefore, full of this determinate resolution to drive from out of him the frenzy which had taken possession of his heart and mind, he went to the hotel and read in his bedroom for an hour or so, during all of which time Bella Waldron's face was looking out at him from the pages of the _Navy and Army Illustrated_, and was always before him until he went forth to try still another foreign restaurant. Yet she was there too, and her pure, innocent eyes were gazing at him across the imitation flowers and the red candle-shades in the middle of the table; and so, also, they were in the stalls of the Empire, until he fell asleep in his seat. Nor was she absent from his mind during the long hours of the night. CHAPTER IV PORTSMOUTH _EN FÊTE_