The Anarchist was sheltering from the storm inside a café, and came out on their approach in the first great drops of a pelting rainstorm. "Yes, here I am," he repeated, saying something to Agatha in a language that had no meaning for Ivor, to which she replied quickly in the same, stepping aside in the shelter while the Anarchist hailed and stopped a fiacre flying past to stables. Then she wished Ivor good-bye, offering her hand, which he either did not or would not see. "Good-bye," he said, when de Konski was handing her into the carriage. As she got in, she looked out and saw him replace his hat in the buffeting wind. Then she drove to Rumpelmayer's, where Ermengarde was still waiting. She could not catch the expression of his face as she drove off, but fancied a softening in its sullen hardness, while Ivor, unable in the rain and wind to catch a full glance of her face, turned back into the café with a dreadful sickness of heart, feeling that he had parted once for all with the better influences and purer hopes of his life, and was thrown definitely back to such consolation as a dishonourable union offered. Nothing mattered now; a sort of reckless joy took hold of him at the thought, and he shook off the heart-sickness with a wild laugh. "Let's have a bock," he cried gaily. "If we must go to the devil, let's go with a light heart." "But why go to the devil at all?" de Konski asked, when the waiter brought the drink. "Nowhere else to go to, old chap. Nobody else to so much as look at the likes of me. I ain't worth the snap of a finger. Lord bless you, de Konski, that young saint you just popped into the trap out of my contaminating company never cared a hang for me--no, not a twopenny damn, so she says, and now I'm down on my luck she won't---- O Lord! Well! who cares? Better fish in the sea than ever came out of it, eh?" "That depends on your fishing. Sometimes you net one with gold in its mouth. Pity to let that kind go." "I shall never net this one," he sighed, setting down the glass he had drained, and staring blankly at the table before him. "She never did and never could care for me," he repeated silently to himself. And all the malign enchantment of the morning rushed back in full force, now that, scorned and rejected of one, he felt free to surrender himself to the other. "But I'll do the square thing," he told himself. "I'll marry her, I'm blest if I won't. She shall have her chance at last, poor woman!" The Anarchist, sitting opposite at the wine-stained table, contemplated him with interest. "How," he asked presently, "do you propose to make the journey?" "Going to marry for money, to begin with." "No occasion, then, to trouble about the Spider any more?" "O Lord, that beast! I'd forgotten all about him. I'm an ungrateful brute, de Konski. I'm awfully obliged to you, though, all the same. Shylock sticks out for his pound of flesh, of course?" "Well, hardly that. After all, even he's human, Paul."