Then I went to the lodging where Barbara and the girl had been the night before; I wondered if Barbara had yet kept her promise to take the girl away, back to her father. Surely in time, I thought, young Millard must drift back there, and meet the girl; and so round off the love story in which I was so strongly interested. I found I could not eat; twice I had gone into various places, and ordered a meal, and left the food untouched. And yet I did not seem to need food; all sensation seemed dead within me, or at all events only sharpened to the point of what I had to do. And so at last I came in the dusk into Lincoln's Inn Fields; found the house, and climbed the stairs. I listened at the door for a moment or two; then softly pushed the key into the lock, and passed into the rooms. They were in darkness, and for a moment or two I stood listening, wondering if the man had yet arrived. Then I called his name, and heard it echoing through the ghostly silent place, and coming back at me as though in mockery-- "Mr. Olivant! Mr. Olivant!" I came out again, and lingered about near the house. There were few people about at that time; only once a pair of lovers passed me, as another pair of lovers, twenty years before, had walked in front of me on such a night in that place. I found myself wondering idly what had become of that first pair; whether they had been parted, or whether they had married, or what had become of them. Even while I thought that, I saw Murray Olivant striding along the pavement in the distance, with his cigar stuck in one corner of his mouth, and a thin trail of smoke floating behind him. I got out of the way hurriedly, and let him go into the house without seeing me. I stood there, trying to think how he would climb the stairs--how long it would take him to reach this landing, and now that; so many more moments for his fumbling with a lock he did not understand; and now he was in the place, waiting for me! And then all at once I felt that I could not do it. I turned away, sick at heart; I began to invent excuses why I should not do it. I had soiled my hands once with blood in my own cause; I would not do it again for another. I was afraid; I weakly told myself that another way would be found, and that Murray Olivant's triumph would be cut short. But not by me. I went away into the busier streets, and I walked about for more than an hour. It was quite dark when I got back at last to the place, and even then I think I had made up my mind that I could not do it. I found myself praying, as I went up the stairs, that he might insult me--might even attack or strike me--so that I might be forced to do the thing, and to do it not in cold blood. If only it might be a matter of fighting--some desperate business that should nerve my arm for the one necessary moment--then I would not mind.