“Well my dear, I liked it as little as you did,” said the Manager. “But what was to be done? The load was not too great, it was merely that the horse was frightened, and there was no persuading it that it would not come to grief. Like the rest of us it would insist on thinking of the hill in front of it, instead of concentrating its mind on the next step. You see while you anathematised the driver I, like the melancholy Jaques, did ‘moralize this spectacle.’” They laughed and bade him good night, but Ivy looked rather anxiously after him as, having seen them to their door, he recrossed Seymour Street to his lodgings a little further up. “Nell,” she said to her companion, “how very ill Mr. Macneillie looks to-night. I think he will break down altogether.” “Oh, I hope not,” said Helen Orme. “I think he is only depressed. He has lost his mother lately you see, and besides I’m sure there is plenty to account for depression with such houses as we have had lately.” Meanwhile Macneillie had reached his desolate rooms. He had been thinking of the Stratford performances, of Ralph’s brilliant success, of the crowded theatre;--it seemed to him that he ought now to have found a sweet-faced little housekeeper sitting by the fire and making toast, that there ought to have been a welcoming glance from Evereld’s truthful blue eyes. Instead there was an empty room and a fireless grate and a solitary meal awaiting him. He sat down and ate dutifully but quite without appetite. He forced himself to remember how much better it was that Ralph and Evereld should be near Christine; but the more he thought the more that horrible craving to be there too assailed him. And presently, for the first time in his life, a feeling of deadly faintness came over him; he staggered into his bedroom. The gas was turned low, the window which was at the back of the house had been left wide open, he breathed more freely and leant for some minutes against the shutter, vaguely conscious of the night sky and of the dark outline of the neighbouring buildings. In his eyes there was the same look of awe--of a great human dread--which makes the eyes of the Pompeian sentinel so pathetic. He had endured long and patiently, had thought little of the effect on himself, but now the dread of an utter failure of health seized him, and he knew that it was no idle fancy but a very real peril which must be bravely faced. And yet better, a thousand times better, the wreck of body and mind than the failure to be a law-abiding citizen. Better this cruel absence from the woman he loved than faithlessness to what he knew to be right. “There is not a pin to choose between me and that tram-car horse!” he reflected, pulling down the blind and turning up the gas with a humourous smile flickering even then about his pale lips. “The way is slippery and there’s a hill to be climbed,--it is collar work, but a step at a time may do it safely after all. Anyhow I will put ‘a stiff back to a stubborn brae.’”