He could walk no longer through the drizzling rain, in futile struggle with his soul’s needs. As possible to cut out his heart and fling it at Everard’s feet as to surrender Yvonne. He called himself a fool.

The glare in front of a cheap music-hall attracted him. He entered, mounted to the nine-penny balcony, where he stood leaning over the wooden partition, wedged among a crowd of loungers. The air was filled with the smoke of cheap tobacco and the fumes of the bar behind. A girl on the stage was singing a song in the chorus of which the thronged house roared lustily. Then came a tenor vocalist with drawing-room ballads. Joyce attended absently, hearing and seeing in a confused dream. A neighbour asking him for a light aroused him from his reverie. He wondered why he had come. To-night of all nights, when he might be at home in the joy of his heart’s desire. Yet he stayed.

A flashing family appeared riding on nondescript cycles. He watched them with half-shut eyes, caressing a quaint conceit that they were his thoughts whirling around in concrete form. The bursts of deafening applause seemed to soothe him. Presently a street-scene cloth was let down and a battered man appeared and sang a song about drink and twins and brokers. He threw such humourous gusto into the performance that Joyce laughed in spite of his preoccupation, and remained in amused anticipation of his second turn. The bell tinkled. The “comedian” came on and was greeted with vociferous applause. With music-hall realism he was dressed in prison-clothes, glengarry, woollen stockings, and black-arrowed suit all complete. He had made up his face into a startling brute. Joyce felt sick. He did not catch the first verse; only the concluding lines of the chorus,

"I ‘ve done my bit of time,

For ’itting of my missus on the chump, chump, chump.”

But then the man began to speak, and Joyce could not help hearing. A horrible fascination held him. The ignoble figure poured out with grotesque and voluble cynicism the comic history of the prison-life; the plank-bed, the skilly, the oakum, the exercise-yard. He sketched his pals, detailed the sordid tricks for obtaining food, the mean malingering, the debasing habits. And all with a horrible fidelity. The audience shrieked with laughter. But Joyce lost sense of the mime. The man was real, one of the degraded creatures with whom he himself had once been indistinguishably mingled—a loathsome fact from the past. The smell of the prison floated over the footlights and filled his nostrils. All his overwrought nerves quivering with repulsion, he broke through the crowd hemming him in against the partition, and rushed down into the street.

How long and whither he walked he did not know. At last he found himself within familiar latitudes, outside the Angel Tavern. He was wet through from the fine, penetrating rain, tired, cold, and utterly miserable. The revulsion of feeling in the music-hall had thrown him back years in his self-esteem. The soil of the gaol had never seemed so ineffaceable. In the blaze of light by the tavern door he paused, irresolute. Then, remembering the disastrous results of an attempt years before to seek such consolation, he shivered and turned away. It was too dangerous.

About a hundred yards further, a woman passed him, turned, and overtook him.

“I thought it was you,” she said. He recognised the voice as that of Annie Stevens. It was not far from the spot where he had first met her, and where, some short time after, he had met her again. For months, however, he had lost sight of her. He recognised her voice, but her appearance was unfamiliar, and her face was half hidden by a Salvation Army bonnet. The apparent cynicism of her attire revolted him.

“Why are you masquerading like this?” he asked, continuing to walk onwards.

“It’s not masquerading. It’s real. I recognised you, and thought perhaps you’d care to know.”

He slackened his pace imperceptibly, and she walked by his side.

“You don’t seem to believe it,” she resumed. “I don’t tell lies. It’s the truth that has generally cursed me.”

“Then why are you walking up and down here at this time of night?”

“Doing rescue work.”

“Have you rescued any one yet?” asked Joyce, with a touch of sarcasm.

“No. I scarce expect to.”

“Then why are you trying?”

“Because it’s the beastliest thing I could think of doing,” she said, stopping abruptly, and facing him, as he turned, in the defiant way he remembered from the theatre days.

“You ’re an odd girl,” he said.

“You don’t suppose I wear this disgusting bonnet and get hustled by roughs and blackguarded by women because I like it! I haven’t been converted, and I don’t shriek out ‘Hallelujah,’ and I won’t,—but I earn an honest living at the Shelter during the day, and at night I come out. It’s the beastliest thing I can think of doing,” she repeated. “If I knew of anything beastlier I’d do it. I ’ve had flames inside me since I gave you away,—I’d have killed myself for you after,—and hell since I went on the streets,—but I think the other was worse. I ’ve learned what you felt like; now I’m trying to burn out the fire—”

“Stop for a moment,” he said, with a queer catch in his throat. “Do you mean you are doing this for your own inner self?”

“Yes,” she replied, her direct intuition divining the implied alternative. “I don’t know much about Jesus and my immortal soul. That ’ll come. I want one day to be able to remember that I loved you—without hating myself and feeling sick with the shame and the horror of it all. You may think me a silly fool if you like, but that’s why I’m doing it. Let us walk on. We need n’t attract attention.” This was wise; for more than one passer-by had turned round, struck by the two intent white faces. Joyce obeyed passively, but continued for some moments to look down upon her in great wonder. An idea, which he became dimly aware had been struggling for birth in the dark of his soul for the past two hours, dawned upon him amid a strange, exulting excitement. Suddenly he took her by the arm and held it very tightly. She looked up at him, astonished.

“What is the matter with you?”

“Do you know what you have done tonight?” he said, in a shaking voice. “You have shown me how to burn out my hell too. You have retrieved any wrong you have done me. If my forgiveness is worth having, you have it, from the depths of my soul.”

He was strangely moved. In the impulse of his exaltation, he drew her quickly into the gloom of a doorway—the pavement was momentarily deserted—and kissed her. She uttered a little cry and shrank back.

“Is that for forgiveness?”

“Yes,” he cried; and then he broke from her abruptly, and went on along the pavement with great strides.

He was no longer uncertain. The problem of his life was solved. His mind was crystal clear. At last the time had come for the great atonement to his degraded self, the supreme sacrifice that should clear his being of stain.

At last he could perform that act of renunciation that would give the strength back into his eyes to meet calmly the scrutiny of his fellow-man. Renunciation! The word rang in his ears and echoed to his footsteps.

He did not doubt that it would not be to Yvonne’s lesser happiness to regain her lost environment of luxury and tender care. On the other hand, he judged her rightly enough to know that she would have found compensating pleasures in a life of privation with himself. Had it not been so, mere manliness would have decided in the Bishop’s favour. In perfect fairness (he saw now), he could have claimed her. His sacrifice was made in pure loyalty to his conscience.

And it had been reserved, too, for that ignorant, wayward woman, who had groped her unguided way thus grotesquely to the Principle, to have led him thither and revealed its elemental application. He felt a stirring of shame that strengthened his manhood.

The rain had stopped. The clouds broke and drifted across the heavens, and a misty moon appeared at intervals, shedding its pale light upon the unlovely thoroughfare. A fresh breeze sprang up and made Joyce, in his wet things, shiver with cold. At the nearest tavern he stopped, entered, called for some hot spirits, this time from no temptation to drown care, and asked for writing materials. Then, in the midst of the noise of thick voices and clatter of drinking vessels, he wrote at a corner of the bar his letter of renunciation.

A few minutes afterwards he dropped it into a pillar-box. The faint patter of its fall inside struck like a death-note upon his ear, shocked him with a sense of the irrevocable. Now that the act of renunciation was accomplished, he felt frightened. The immensity of his sacrifice began to loom before him. He became conscious of the dull premonitions of an agony hitherto undreamed of, for all his suffering in the past.

Shiveringly he bent his steps homeward. The gas was burning dimly in the sitting-room. As was usual on the rare occasions when he had spent the evening out, Yvonne had brought down his bedroom candle and had laid his modest supper neatly for him. His slippers were warming by the fire. At the sight, his pain grew greater. Having taken off his wet boots and lit his candle—he could eat no supper—he turned off the gas, and went out of the room. On the landing outside Yvonne’s door were the tiny shoes she had placed there for Sarah to clean. He looked at them for a second or two and mounted the stairs hurriedly.

In the shock and excitement of battle a man can bear the amputation of a mangled limb without great suffering. It is afterwards that the agony sets in, when the nerves have quieted to responsiveness. So it was with Joyce on that sleepless night of his great renunciation, and with his misery was mingled despair lest all should prove to be futile, his theory of renunciation; a ghastly fallacy. Time was when he would have mocked at the proposition. Could he even now defend it upon rational grounds? Had he not cut off his leg to compensate for the loss of an arm, thereby adding to the gaiety of the high gods? He tossed about in the bed in anguish, “burning out his hell.”

A man of sensitive, emotional temperament, however, cannot pass through such an ordeal unchanged. Some fibres must be shrivelled up, whilst others are toughened. Joyce rose in the morning with aching head and exhausted nerves, but still with a dull sense of calm. Fallacy or not, at any rate he had chosen the man’s part. The consciousness of it was an element of strength. He dressed and went downstairs.

Yvonne was already in the room, neat and dainty as usual, making the toast for breakfast. She was pale and had the faint rings below the eyes that ever tell tales on a woman’s face. She looked round at him anxiously, as she knelt before the fire. He saw her trouble and went and sat in the armchair beside her and spread out his hands to warm them.

“You have been worrying, my poor little Yvonne,” he said gently. “I was a selfish beast to let you think I wanted to make up my mind, when my course was so plain. I wrote to Everard last night. I told him to cherish the treasure that he has got. You shouldn’t have worried over it.”

Yvonne turned away her face from him, and remained silent for some moments, half kneeling, half sitting, the toasting-fork drooping idly from her hand.

“It was foolish of me,” she replied at last “But it seemed hard to leave you alone—and I ’ve got so used to this little place—one gets attached to places, like a cat—Did you—were you sorry to give me away?”

“Of course,” said Joyce. “I thought we could go on being brother and sister till the end of all things. Well, all things have an end, and this is it.”

“You would not prefer me to stay?” asked Yvonne, in her soft voice.

He would have given his soul to have been able to throw his arms round her, passionately and wildly—she was so near him, so maddeningly desired. Did she realise, he wondered, what flame was in her words? He leaned back in the chair, as if to avert the temptation by increasing the distance between them.

“No,” he said, with a sharp breath, “I could not—it will be a wrench breaking up the—partnership. But it is all for the best. I know you will be happy and cared for, and that will be a happiness to me.”

Sarah brought in the breakfast and retired. They sat down to table. Somehow or other the meal proceeded. Two things had come by post for Joyce, one a belated but laudatory notice of “The Wasters,” the other a cheque from the office of a weekly paper. He passed them both to her, according to custom.

“You mustn’t bother about me at all, Yvonne. I am in a different way of business altogether from what I was when we first started housekeeping. The new book will do ever so much better than ‘The Wasters.’ I shall miss you terribly—at first—but it will all dry straight, Yvonne. I dare say I shall go on living here. Runcle and I are immense pals, you know—perhaps I may go into partnership with him and bring some modern go-ahead ideas into the concern—become a Quaritch or Sotheran—who knows? Yes, I should n’t like to leave these quaint, dear old rooms,” he said, looking round, anywhere but in Yvonne’s face, with an air of cheerfulness that he felt in his heart must be ghastly. “Something of you and your dear companionship will linger about them. I shall pretend, like the ‘Marchioness,’ that you are with me.”

He passed his tea-cup, and, meeting her eyes, tried to smile. The comers of her lips responded bravely.

“And at last you will come into indisputed possession of your furniture,” she said.

He had not the heart to protest. So they continued to talk in this light strain of the coming parting, until Joyce, looking at his watch, found it was time to go down to the shop. At the door, on his way out, he paused to relight his pipe. Then, without trusting himself to look round, he left her. But if he had turned he would have seen her grow suddenly very white, clutch the mantel-piece for support with one hand while the other pressed her bosom hard, and sway for a second or two with shut eyes.

Downstairs he resumed his unfinished task of the evening before. He worked at it doggedly, trying not to think. But it was as futile as trying to hold one’s breath beyond a certain period.

“Yvonne is going—to marry Everard—going for ever—I shall be alone—she will lie in his arms—I shall go mad—God help me—if it is more than I can bear, there is a way out—I can keep up till she goes—she shall not know—afterwards.” His brain could not work beyond. The same thoughts throbbed with almost rhythmic recurrence as he priced and catalogued the books. Once he opened a tattered “Marcus Aurelius”:—

“If pain is an affliction, it must affect either the body or the mind; if the body is hurt, let it say so; as for the soul, it is in her power to preserve her serenity and calm, by supposing the accident no evil.”

He laughed to himself mirthlessly, and threw the book on the fourpenny heap. “Or pretending, like the Marchioness,” he said. He was scarcely in a mood for “Marcus Aurelius.”

A messenger-boy appeared with a letter for Madame Latour. Joyce sent it up to her by the shop-boy, who presently brought down a reply note. The preparations for her departure had begun. Joyce’s heart seemed set in a vice and he nearly cried aloud with the pain.

The hours wore on; the piles of books were disposed of; nothing to do, but wait for customers. To keep himself employed he copied untidy pages of his manuscript. He went up for dinner. Yvonne was more subdued than at breakfast, and they scarcely spoke. When the meal was over, she told him quietly of the letter she had received.

“Everard says that he is getting the special licence to-day, and the marriage will take place to-morrow at St Luke’s, Islington. Considering the circumstances, he thinks it best that there should be no delay.”

“It is just as well,” he replied. “When changes come, it is best that they should come swiftly. Has he made any more definite arrangements—the hour?”

“He will send me a message later.”

“You will have to put up your things. If I can help you, Yvonne—”

“Thanks—no. I have so little. The few odds and ends I shall leave you—as mementoes. You would like to keep them, would n’t you?”

“Thank you, Yvonne,” he said, turning away. They had spoken in subdued voices, as folks do when discussing funeral arrangements. Joyce, blinded and dazed by his misery, was unperceptive of her joylessness. At the most, he was conscious of a seriousness that, under the circumstances, was not unnatural. His own pain he hid with anxious effort.

The afternoon hours passed. He lit the gas in the shop, and proceeded with whatever mechanical employment he could find. It was a relief to be alone. The old man’s gossip would have jarred upon him, driven him up to the sitting-room where the ordeal was fiercest, or out into the hard-featured streets. He would have two or three days of solitude before Runcle returned from Exeter.

Messages came from the Bishop. One for Yvonne. Another for him, acknowledging his letter, announcing that the hour of noon had been fixed upon, shortly before which time a carriage would be sent to convey Yvonne to the church, and begging him in most courteous terms to assist at the ceremony and give Yvonne away. An echo of the Salvation Army girl’s voice came back to him, and he smiled grimly. “It’s the beastliest thing I can do.”

He scribbled a line of acquiescence and gave it to the waiting messenger-boy. “I had not thought of the dregs,” he said to himself.

That evening they sat drearily in their accustomed places by the fireside, each knowing it to be their last together. Night after night they had spent in each other’s society, Yvonne sewing or reading or dreaming in a lazy, contented way, Joyce writing upon a board laid across his knees. Sometimes she would come and lean over the back of his chair and watch the words as they came from his pen, her soft wavy black hair very near his fair, close-trimmed head.

“Send me away if I’m worrying you,” she used to say.

Whereupon he would laugh happily and answer:—

“See how beautifully I am writing. I should never have thought of that remark if you had not been there.”

“I like to play at feeling a guardian angel,” she said once.

“You can feel it without the playing,” he replied, drawing his head aside and looking round at her. “When your wings are over me like that, I do work that I could n’t do unaided.”

And she had blushed and felt very happy.

But now, on this last evening, they sat apart—half the world already between them—and talked constrainedly, with long silences. For the greater part of the time he shaded his face with his hand, sparing himself the sight of her hungered-for sweetness and saving her the sight of the hunger he felt was in his eyes. When at last she rose to bid him good-night, he nerved himself to meet her gaze calmly. And then for the first time he was shocked at the change that the night and the day had wrought in her.

She stood before him, infinitely sweet and simple; but more wan even than she had been on that day in the hospital when she had learned the loss of her voice. For the still unvanished pathos of childhood that had then smoothed her face was gone, and the sterner pathos of the woman’s experience had taken its place. Yet the interpretation did not come to him.

“My poor child,” he said. “You are scarcely strong enough yet to bear such an upheaval as this. Try to have a good sleep.” He held the door for her to pass out. And then with a great gulp, he continued, “You must look your best to-morrow.”

He caught her soft cold hand, put it to his lips, and shut the door quickly. The prison seemed as comfort when compared with this torment.