"I shall have you--I shall have you at last, my beautiful, tall Janey, for whom I hunger. But I am filled with doubts. There are some men in whose mouths manna turns to dust and the water of life to gall. Everything I touch is doomed. Either my soul or my body betrays me--my soul is so hot and my body so weak--so damnably weak. If only my hot soul had been given a stout body, or my weak body a weak soul ... then I should have been happy. But now it is the eternal fight between fire and water." Janey pushed the letter aside, and picked up another. She had been trying to comfort herself with Quentin's letters, but they were not on the whole of a comforting nature. His restless misery was in them all. If his last letter had been happy, she would not have worried nearly so much. She would have put down his silence to some trite external cause--pressure of work or indefiniteness of plans--he had always been an erratic correspondent. But his unhappiness opened a dozen roads to her morbid imaginings. It was dreadful to think that all she had given to Quentin had only made him more unhappy. Perhaps he was too miserable to write--not likely, since he was one of those men whom despair makes voluble, but nevertheless a real terror to her unreason. Perhaps he had not received her last letter, and thought that she had played him false--he had always been jealous and inclined to suspicion. This last idea obtained a hold on her that would have been impossible had not her mind been weakened by anxiety. She had heard of letters going astray in the post, and probably Quentin had been expecting one from her, and not receiving it had been too proud to write himself. Or perhaps he had received it, but had thought it cold. He had often taken her to task for some fancied coldness which she had never meant. In her desperation she resolved to write again. Hastily cramming his letters into the boot-box where she unromantically kept them, she seized paper and ink, and began to scrawl despairingly-- "MY DARLING, DARLING BOY, "Why don't you write? Didn't you get my last letter? I posted it on the 16th. Quentin, I can't stand this suspense. Are you unhappy? Oh, my boy, my boy, my heart aches for you. I know you suffer--and I can't bear it----" The pen fell from her shaking hand as footsteps sounded in the garden. The next minute Leonard came in--luckily for Janet he was not very observant. "Well, Janey--I've sent off the wire." "What wire?" she asked dully. "To the old bounder, of course--to buck him up for to-night. I said 'Cheer up. You'll soon be dead.' That ought to encourage him." Janey smiled wanly. "Meantime I've got a piece of news for you. It'll make you laugh. But let's have a drink first--I'm dreadfully thirsty. This weather dries one up like blazes." "There's beer in the cupboard."