"I wish we could dream at the same time," said Isabel… "Dream

walks. I can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you

again."

"If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, "we might have walked

long walks and talked long talks for all our lives."

"Not in a world of Baileys," said Isabel. "And anyhow-"

She stopped short. I looked interrogation.

"We've loved," she said.

I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the

compartment. "Good-bye," I said a little stiffly, conscious of the

people upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky,

looking at me very steadfastly.

"Come here," she whispered. "Never mind the porters. What can they

know? Just one time more-I must."

She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down

upon me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.

And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and

Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away

together.

It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin

to see what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a

rational, responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her

two days before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter

but Isabel. Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every

duty. It astounds me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my

work, forgot everything but that we two were parted. I still

believe that with better chances we might have escaped the

consequences of the emotional storm that presently seized us both.

But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it, and our

circumstances betrayed us. It was partly Shoesmith's unwisdom in

delaying his marriage until after the end of the session-partly my

own amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster. But

we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete

restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary that Shoesmith's

marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I

should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret

in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we

visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my

presence at the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a

weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last

moment which would justify my absence…

I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of

my separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all

my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think

of nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one

intimate I had found in the world. I came back to the House and the

office and my home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty,

and it did not save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as

I had never felt before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the

daytime I did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two

occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to

me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in

a house whose owner lies dead upstairs.

I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something

in that stripped my soul bare.

It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that

the house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a

men's dinner-" A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he

invited me; "everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author,

and Heaven knows what will happen!" I remember that afterwards

Tarvrille was accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner

a marvel and a memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I

suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in misery, I should

have found the same wild amusement in it that glowed in all the

others. There were one or two university dons, Lord George Fester,

the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men,

Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can't

remember, the three men Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord

Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several

others. We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the

conversation was already becoming general-so far as such a long

table permitted-when the fire asserted itself.

It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of

burning rubber,-it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire.

The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres

that had sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the

end of the table. "Something burning," said the man next to me.

"Something must be burning," said Panmure.

Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly

imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid

disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. "Just

see, will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his

left.

Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of

the siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that

followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in