He had hoped that perhaps separation would make him calmer. Of late he had often denied himself the sight of Janey in that same vain hope. But now, as then, he found her letters almost as disintegrating as her presence--indeed more so, since they gave wider scope to his familiar demon of doubt. He wondered if he would ever find rest. Would marriage give it to him? He started up suddenly on the bed. An awful thought was thrust like a sword against his heart--the thought that even in marriage he would not find peace. He had fallen into the habit of looking on marriage as the end of sorrows--and now, when fate and hard work seemed to have brought it within gazing-distance of hope, he suddenly saw that it would be as full of torment as his present state; or rather, more so--just as his present state was an intensification of the pain of earlier days. He realised--hardly definitely, but with horrible acuteness--that he had allowed love to frustrate love, and that by his demand to look into that great dread Face, he had brought on himself scorching and blindness and doom. "Thou canst not see my Face and live." He sprang off the bed. His pulses were hammering, his blood was thick, a kind of film obscured his eyes, so that he groped his way to the dressing-table. A clock struck four, and he suddenly remembered an engagement he had that afternoon. He would go--it would distract him. He might forget Janey--if only for an hour, he would be free of the torment that each thought of her carried like poison in a golden bowl. It was strange, it was terrible, that he should ever have come to want to forget Janey--and it was not because he did not love her; he loved her a hundred times more passionately than ever. But the love which had once been his strength and salve had now become a rotten sickness of the soul. He dressed himself, removed as far as possible the stains of sorrow and exhaustion from his face, and plunged out to take his place in the restless, ill-managed pageant of the pavements, where threads are tangled, characters lost, and cues unheard. He was going to a semi-literary gathering at a friend's flat in Coleherne Gardens. He did not look forward to it particularly, but it might help him in his twofold struggle--to win Janey in the future and forget her for the present. The room was crowded. Hallidie was presiding over a mixed assembly of more-or-less celebrities with that debonair self-confidence which had helped make him a famous novelist in spite of his novels. There were one or two great ones present, just to raise the level--he did not introduce them to Lowe. He knew exactly whom they would like to meet, and Lowe, he felt, would let the conversation down, just when it was becoming yeasty with literary wit. There were other people in the room who showed a tendency to do this, and Hallidie had carefully introduced them to one another, so that they could all fail mutually in a well-upholstered corner.