He sat on the bed, rolled a cigarette, and began to think clearly. That he had for ever forfeited Olivia’s affection it never entered his head to doubt. He saw her face grow more cold and tragic, and her eyes more horror-stricken at every fresh revelation of mendacity. Loathing himself, he had not pleaded for forgiveness; he had done penance, applied the lash, blackening himself unmercifully. He had lost sense of actual things in his cold romance of deception. He stood before her self-proclaimed, a monster of lies. Now he saw himself an unholy stranger profaning the sanctity of her life. He had fought for Heaven with Hell’s weapons, and Eternal Justice had hurled him back into the abyss. In the abyss he must remain, leaving her to tread the stars. The exposure of the Vronsky myth had hurt her as much as anything. “Vronsky?” She put her hands, fingers apart, to her temples. “But you made me give my heart to Vronsky!” Yes, surely he had committed towards her the unforgivable sin. He was damned—at any rate, in this world. To rid her irremediably of his pestilent existence was the only hope of salvation. Olifant was a fool, speaking according to the folly of an honourable gentleman. He clenched his teeth and gripped his hands. If only he could have been such a fool! To appear the kind of man that Olifant easily, naturally, was had been his gnawing ambition from his first insight into gentle life, long ago, in the Prince’s household. But, all the same, Olifant was a fool—a sort of Galahad out for Grails, and remote from the baseness in which he had wallowed. “Go to Olivia. She loves you.” Chivalrous imbecile! He had not seen Olivia’s great staring dark eyes with rims around them, and the awful little drawn face. He was right—it was the only way out. Yet, during all this interview with Olivia, he had been quite sane. He had indulged in no histrionics. He had not declaimed, and flung his arms about, as he had done in Olifant’s study. He had felt himself talking like a dead man immersed up to the neck in the flames of Hell, but possessed of a cold clear intellect. In a way, he was proud of this. To have made an emotional appeal would have obscured the issue towards which his new-found honesty was striving. His last words to Olivia were: “And the future?” She said hopelessly: “Is there a future?” Then she drew a deep breath and passed her fingers across her face. “Don’t talk to me any more, for heaven’s sake. I must be alone. I must have air. I must walk.” She shrank wide of him as he opened the door for her, and she passed out, her eyes remote. It was then that the poet-charlatan became suddenly aware of his sentence. If the Avengers, or what not uncheerful personages of Greek Tragedy had surrounded him with their ghastly shapes and had chanted their dismal Choric Ode of Doom, his inmost soul could not have been more convinced of that which he must forthwith do. He never thought of questioning the message. He faced the absolute.