"Here's a note from Miss Monogue," he said. "She's awfully ill I think, I ought--"

Clare's face hardened again. She got up from the table--

"Just as you please--" she said.

He climbed on to the omnibus that was to stumble with him down Piccadilly with a. hideous, numbing sense of being under the hand of Fate. Why, at this moment, in all time, should this letter of Norah Monogue's have made its unhappy appearance? With what difficulty and sorrow had he and Clare reached once more a reconciliation only, so wantonly, to be plucked away from it again! From the top of his omnibus he looked down upon a sinister London. It was a heavy, lowering day; thick clouds like damp cloths came down upon the towers and chimneys.

The trees in the Green Park were black and chill and in and out of the Clubs figures slipped cautiously and it seemed furtively. Just beyond the Green Park they were building a vast hotel, climbing figures and twisting lines of scaffolding pierced the air, and behind the rolling and rattling of the traffic the sound of many hammers beat rhythmically, monotonously....

To Peter upon his omnibus, suddenly that sound that he had heard before--that sound of London stirring--came back to him, and now more clearly than he had ever known it. Tap-tap-tap-tap...

Clamp-clamp-tap-tap-tap-tap--whir! whir!... Clamp-clamp....

It seemed to him that all the cabs and the buses and the little black figures were being hurried by some power straight, fast, along Piccadilly to be pitched, at the end of it, pell-mell, helter-skelter into some dark abysmal pit, there to perish miserably.

Yes, the beast was stirring! Ever so little the pavements, the houses were heaving. Perhaps if one could see already the soil was cracking beneath one's feet. "Look out! London will have you in a minute."

Tap-tap-tap-tap--clamp-clamp--tap-tap-tap-tap--whir-whir--clamp-clamp....

Anyhow it was a heavy, clammy day. The houses were ghosts and the people were ghosts, and grey shadows, soon perhaps to be a yellow fog, floated about the windows and the doors and muffled all human sounds.

He passed the great pile of scaffolding, saw iron girders shining, saw huge cranes swinging in mid-air, saw tiny, tiny black atoms perched above the noise and swallowed by the smoke... tap-tap-clamp-clamp....

Yes, the beast was moving... and, out and in, lost and then found again, crept that twisting chain of beggars to whose pallid army Peter himself had once so nearly belonged.

"I suppose I've got a headache after all that row with Clare," Peter thought as he climbed off the omnibus.

V

He realised, as he came into the Bloomsbury square, and saw Mrs.

Brockett gloomily waiting for him, that the adventures of his life were most strangely bound together. Not for an instant did he seem to be able to escape from any one of them. Now it would be Cornwall, now the Bookshop, now Stephen, now Mr. Zanti, now Bucket Lane, now Treliss--all of them interweaving, arresting his action at every moment. Because he had done that once now this must not be permitted him; he felt, as he rang the old heavy bell of Brockett's that his head would never think clearly again. As the door opened and he stepped into the hall he heard, faintly, across the flat spaces of the Square "Tap-tap-tap-tap-clamp-clamp...."

Even Mrs. Brockett, who might be considered if any one in the world, immune from morbid imaginations, felt the heaviness of the day, suggested a prevalence of thunder, and shook her head when Peter asked about Miss Monogue.

"She's bad, Mr. Peter, very bad, poor dear. There's no doubt about that.

It's hard to see what can be done for her--but plucky! That's a small word for it!"

"I'm sure she is," said Peter, feeling ashamed of having made so much of his own little troubles.

"She must get out of London if she's to improve at all. In a week or two I hope she'll be able to move."

"How's every one else?"

"Oh, well enough." Mrs. Brockett straightened her dress with her beautiful hands in the old familiar way--"But you're not looking very hearty yourself, Mr. Peter."

"Oh! I'm all right," he answered smiling; but she shook her head after him as she watched him go up the stairs.

And then he was surprised. He came into Norah Monogue's room and found her sitting up by her window, looking better than he had ever seen her.

Her face was full of colour and her eyes bright and smiling. Only on her hands the blue veins stood out, and their touch, when she shook hands with him, was hot and burning.

But he was reassured; Mrs. Brockett had exaggerated and made the worst of it all.

"You're looking splendid--I'm so glad. I was afraid from your letter-"

"Oh! I really am getting on," she broke in gaily, "and it's the nicest boy in the world that you are to come in and see me so quickly. Only on a day like this London does just lie heavily upon one doesn't it? and one just longs for the country--"

A little breath of a sigh escaped from her and she looked through her window at the dim chimneys, the clouds hanging like consolidated smoke, the fine, thin dust that filtered the air.

"You're looking tired yourself, Peter. Working too hard?"

"No," he shook his head. "The work hasn't been coming easily at all.

I suppose I've been too conscious, lately, of the criticisms every one made about 'The Stone House.' I don't believe one ought really to listen to anybody and yet it's so hard not to, and so difficult to know whose opinion one ought to take if one's going to take anybody's. I wish,"

he suddenly brought out, "Henry Galleon were still alive. I could have followed him."

"But why follow anybody?"

"Ah! that's just it. I'm beginning to doubt myself and that's why it's getting so difficult."

Her eyes searched his face and she saw, at once, that he was in very real trouble. He looked younger, just then, she thought, than she had ever seen him, and she felt herself so immensely old that she could have taken him into her arms and mothered him as though he'd been her own son.

"There are a lot of things the matter," she said. "Tell me what they all are."

"Well," he said slowly, "I suppose it's all been mostly my own fault--but the real difficulty is that I don't seem to be able to run the business of being married and the business of writing together. I don't think Clare in the least cares now about my writing--she almost resents it; she cared at first when she thought that I was going to make a huge success of it, but now--"

"But, of course," said Miss Monogue, "that success comes slowly--it must if it's going to be any use at all--"

"Well, she doesn't see that. And she wants me to go out to parties and play about all the time--and then she doesn't want me to be any of the things that I was before I met her. All my earlier life frightens her--I suppose," he suddenly ended, "I want her to be different and she wants me to be different and we can't make a compromise."

Then Miss Monogue said: "Have any outside people interfered at all?"

Peter coloured. "Well, of course, Mrs. Rossiter stands up for Clare. She came and talked to me this morning and I think the things that she said were quite true. I suppose I am morose and morbid sometimes--more than I realise--and then," he added slowly, "there's Cards--"

"Cards?"

"Cardillac--a man I was at school with. I'm very fond of him. He's the best friend I've got, and he's been all over the place and done everything and, of course, knows ever so much more about the world than I do. The fact is he thinks really that my novels are dreadful nonsense, only he's much too kind to say so--and, of course, Clare looks up to him a lot. Although he's only my own age he seems so much older than both Clare and myself. I don't believe she'd have lost interest in my work so quickly if he hadn't influenced her--and he's influenced me too--" Peter added sighing.

"Well--and is there anything else?"

"Yes. There's Stephen. I can't begin to tell you how I love that kid.

There haven't been many people in my life that I've cared about and I've never realised anything so intensely before. Besides," he went on laughing proudly, "he's such a splendid kid! I wish you could see him, Norah. He'll do something one day--"

"Well, what's the trouble about Stephen?"

"Clare's so odd about him. There are times when I don't believe she cares for him the least little bit. Then there are other times when she resents fiercely my interfering about him. Sometimes she seems to love him more than anything in the world, but it's always in an odd defiant way--just as though she were afraid that something would hurt her if she showed that she cared too much."

There was silence between them for a minute and then Peter summed it all up with:--"The fact is, Norah, that every sort of thing's getting in between me and my work and worries me. It's as though I were tossing more balls in the air than I could possibly manage. At one moment I think it's Clare that I've got especially to hang on to--another time it's the book--and then it's Stephen. The moment I've settled down something turns up to remind me of Cornwall or the Bookshop. Fact is I'm getting battered at by something or other and I never can get my breath.

I oughtn't ever to have married--I'm not up to it."

Norah Monogue took his hand.

"You are up to it, Peter, but I expect you've got a lot to go through before you're clear of things. Now I'm going to be brutal. The fact is that you're too self-centred. People never do anything in the world so long as they are wondering whether the world's going to hurt them or no.