The prospect of life alone, without Yvonne, shimmered before him like a bleak landscape revealed by sheet-lightning. A panic shook him. A second flash revealed him to himself. This utter dependence upon Yvonne, this intense need of her that had gone on strengthening, week by week, and day by day, was love. Use, self-concentration, the mere unconcealed affection of daily life had kept it dormant as it grew. Now it awakened under the sudden terror of losing her. A thrill ran through his body. He loved her. She was free. This other set aside, he could marry her. He paced among the piles of books in strange excitement. The boy, who had been rapping his heels against his box-seat by the door, strolled in to see what was doing. Joyce abruptly ordered him to put up the shutters and go home. Meanwhile he made pretence to continue his work of cataloguing. But his brain was in a whirl. His eyes fell upon the marks of Yvonne’s hands and arms on the dust of the folio she had been handling. The mute testimony of their intimacy eloquently moved him. She was part and parcel of his life. He would not give her up without fierce fighting. Then, in the midst of the glow came the fresh memory of his collapse. He sat down by the little deal table, where he was wont to write, and buried his face in his hands, and shivered. His manhood had gone. Nothing could ever restore it. Its semblance was liable to be shattered at any moment by an honest man’s self-assertion. It had perished during those awful years; not to be revived, even by the pure passion of love that was throbbing in his veins. Too restless to sit long, he rose presently and walked about the shop, among the books. The close, dusty air suffocated him. He longed to go out, walk the streets, and shake off the burden that was round his neck. But the feeling that he ought, for Yvonne’s sake, to remain until the Bishop’s departure kept him an irritable prisoner. The minutes passed slowly. Outside was the ceaseless hum and hurry of the street: within, the flare of the gas-jets and the sound of his own purposeless tread. And so for two hours he waited, running the gamut of his emotions with maddening iteration. The terror of losing Yvonne brought at times the perspiration to his forehead. With feverish intensity he argued out his claim upon her. She could not throw him over to go and live with that proud, unsympathetic man who must for ever be to her a stranger. Then his jealous wrath burst forth again, and again came the old hated shiver of degradation. How dare he match himself against one who, with all his faults, had yet lived through his life a stainless gentleman? CHAPTER XXI--A DEMAND IN MARRIAGE