What was to become of him? He could scarcely realise his sentence. Exile from England meant a bitter struggle with poverty; and yet exile was his irremediable lot. In eight or nine hours he must start. There was no escape. He knew Sylvester of old, as hard as iron and as cold as ice, a man to carry out his purpose relentlessly. To-night--to leave this dear world of London behind him; tomorrow--to be in the aimless solitude of some foreign hotel, when, if fortune had been kind, he would have been standing at the altar with the woman whom he desired above all women that had ever entered his life. It was like the blank future of the man condemned to death. Thoughts of his own misdoing, of his banishment, faded into a vague heaviness at the back of his brain, while the pang of a great hunger gripped him. He flung his arms on the table and buried his head and clutched his hair in both hands. “My God, my God! I can't give her up!” he cried. Now that she was torn from him, he craved her with the awful passion of the man no longer young. A picture of her ripe lips and her fresh, eager face, so quick to flush, floated maddeningly before his closed eyes. Last night on parting he had held her close and kissed her. He felt the yielding softness of her bosom against his breast, could almost feel now the throb of her heart. He bit through his sleeve into his arm. The paroxysm passed. He must think. The wedding must be postponed. Sylvester had intrusted him with that duty, out of regard for Ella. See her he could not; his soul shrank from it. A cowardly letter to reach her too late for questions to be asked, giving no reasons, simply stating that he was summoned away that night for an indefinite period? It must be written. He grovelled in his self-abasement. Suddenly he raised his head and stared up, with panting breath and trembling body. A wild, mad idea had sprung from a recrudescence of the forlorn hope with which Sylvester's words had inspired him. He sprang to his feet with a quavering, hysterical laugh. “By Christ! I'll carry it through,” he cried, and he walked about the room, swinging his arms in great gestures. CHAPTER XVII--A WEDDING EVE The room was in a state of bewitching confusion. Trunks, half filled, yawned open on the floor. On the bed were piles of white garments in the midst of which here and there a pink or blue ribbon peeped daintily. Cardboard boxes and tissue paper pervaded space. Hats small and hats immense lay about in unconsidered attitudes upon chintz-covered chairs and other resting-places. A pearl-coloured ball-dress, all gauze and chiffon and foamy nothingness, hung over the bed-rail. A thousand odds and ends--veils, hatpins, mysterious smooth wooden boxes, and cut-glass phials--were strewn on the tables. And the pale morning sunshine streamed in a friendly way into the room.