The yearning to do this fretted his secret heart. To move about the summer fields when the weather was fine, to lounge in an easy-chair over books in seasons of rain, was all very well for the period of convalescence after the confinement in the hospital ward. But after a while, when his muscles regained strength and the new blood coursing through his veins brought colour to his cheeks, he began to feel the old imperious need of movement and of action. Sometimes he went back, as in his talks with the dustman, to the idyllic tempests in the North Sea; sometimes to the fierce freedom of the speed across the illimitable steppes of Russia; sometimes to his perilous escape to Petrograd; sometimes to his tramps along the safe roads of England; to his wanderings through the dangerous by-ways of the East End. Bitterly he cursed the motor-lorry that had knocked him out of his Polish adventure. Except on Olivia he had never so set his heart on a thing before. Well, he shrugged angry shoulders. It was no use thinking of that. Poland had gone, like Olivia, out of his life. And when he came to think of it, so had everything that had made up all that he had known or conceived of life. * * * * * He closed _Tom Jones_, and stared out of the window on the rain-drenched hills; Tom Jones, with his physical lustiness, his strong animal bravura, was more than he could bear. Tom Jones, no matter in what circumstance he was placed, had all the world before him. His gay confidence offended the lost man. For he was lost. Not a lost soul, he told himself; that was taking an absurd Byronical view of the matter. To pose as a modern Manfred would be contemptible. He went down to bed-rock of commonplace. He was a lost man—a fact which was quite serious enough for any human being to contemplate with dismay. Lost, tied by a lame leg in a deadly little backwater of the world, where he must remain till he died. He could write, pour out all the fever of his soul into words. But what was the good, if no word of his could be transmitted from this backwater into the haunts of men? Work without hope—a verse of Coleridge came vaguely to him—was like draining nectar through a sieve. It could only end in heart-break. He stared through the dripping window-pane at the free hills, dim and hopeless in the mist of deluge. Nothingness confronted him. He wondered whether Myra, with diabolical insight and deliberate malice, had not lured him hither, so that she could hold him in relentless grip. At any rate she had cast him into this prison.