He paused, and read the letter through with some dissatisfaction. Then he bent over the paper again, and wrote quickly, with a certain eagerness, as though the impulse which dictated what he wrote were irresistible in the flood of emotions that inspired it. "It is not a bit of use your thinking of going on with this. The thing is impossible. My dear, it is not just for my own sake I urge you to reconsider your purpose. You can't do it. I can't bear the thought of your throwing away all chance of happiness for a man who has left you finally, and is now paralysed and practically helpless. It is self-murder. I won't permit it. I love you, and I want you badly..." Suddenly Dare flung down the pen, and tore the letter into fragments, and burnt them with the aid of matches in the fireless grate. "I can't write to her," he muttered. "It reads all wrong somehow. I must go to her. Things don't sound the same on paper. I've got to see her and speak to her. I must see her." He went out on the balcony again, and resumed his walk and his troubled reflections, which helped not a whit in the solving of the muddle, but only aggravated his sense of the absurd futility of the sacrifice Pamela contemplated. Her resolve was the outcome, he was convinced, of purely intellectual reasoning. If she would only admit the factor of passion, the cold wisdom of her logic would go down before it, as the hardest of glaciers will dissolve adrift in tropic seas. It remained for him to go to her, and make her feel the powerful influence of human love,--force her to realise that, however much other considerations weighed in the great social scheme, love counted above everything, mattered more than anything else,--was the only thing really which did matter. It was the great fundamental principle of the entire universe. He never doubted that he could persuade her into seeing this thing as he saw it. The circumstances he felt justified him in the attempt. The following day he took train for Pretoria. Before seeing Pamela it was necessary to investigate the truth of Blanche Maitland's story. Unless he faced her with facts he could not hope to prevail with her, and his facts must be acquired at first hand. Dare was essentially a man of action. To decide on a certain course with him was to pursue it without delay to the finish. He meant, if possible, to see Arnott himself. But when he arrived at Pretoria, and applied at the address which Blanche had given, he was confronted with the first difficulty; without the doctor's sanction he could not be admitted to the invalid's presence. Arnott's condition was sufficiently grave to make the most stringent rules with regard to the sick-room absolutely imperative.