only obscured it - there were to be no particulars till he should

have submitted his conception to the supreme authority. He had
thrown up his commission, he had thrown up his book, he had thrown

up everything but the instant need to hurry to Rapallo, on the
Genoese shore, where Vereker was making a stay. I wrote him a

letter which was to await him at Aden - I besought him to relieve
my suspense. That he had found my letter was indicated by a

telegram which, reaching me after weary days and in the absence of
any answer to my laconic dispatch to him at Bombay, was evidently

intended as a reply to both communications. Those few words were
in familiar French, the French of the day, which Covick often made

use of to show he wasn't a prig. It had for some persons the
opposite effect, but his message may fairly be paraphrased. "Have

patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face you'll
make!" "Tellement envie de voir ta tete!" - that was what I had to

sit down with. I can certainly not be said to have sat down, for I
seem to remember myself at this time as rattling constantly between

the little house in Chelsea and my own. Our impatience,
Gwendolen's and mine, was equal, but I kept hoping her light would

be greater. We all spent during this episode, for people of our
means, a great deal of money in telegrams and cabs, and I counted

on the receipt of news from Rapallo immediately after the junction
of the discoverer with the discovered. The interval seemed an age,

but late one day I heard a hansom precipitated to my door with the
crash engendered by a hint of liberality. I lived with my heart in

my mouth and accordingly bounded to the window - a movement which
gave me a view of a young lady erect on the footboard of the

vehicle and eagerly looking up at my house. At sight of me she
flourished a paper with a movement that brought me straight down,

the movement with which, in melodramas, handkerchiefs and reprieves
are flourished at the foot of the scaffold.

"Just seen Vereker - not a note wrong. Pressed me to bosom - keeps
me a month." So much I read on her paper while the cabby dropped a

grin from his perch. In my excitement I paid him profusely and in
hers she suffered it; then as he drove away we started to walk

about and talk. We had talked, heaven knows, enough before, but
this was a wondrous lift. We pictured the whole scene at Rapallo,

where he would have written, mentioning my name, for permission to
call; that is I pictured it, having more material than my

companion, whom I felt hang on my lips as we stopped on purpose
before shop-windows we didn't look into. About one thing we were

clear: if he was staying on for fuller communication we should at
least have a letter from him that would help us through the dregs

of delay. We understood his staying on, and yet each of us saw, I
think, that the other hated it. The letter we were clear about

arrived; it was for Gwendolen, and I called on her in time to save
her the trouble of bringing it to me. She didn't read it out, as

was natural enough; but she repeated to me what it chiefly
embodied. This consisted of the remarkable statement that he'd

tell her after they were married exactly what she wanted to know.
"Only THEN, when I'm his wife - not before," she explained. "It's

tantamount to saying - isn't it? - that I must marry him straight
off!" She smiled at me while I flushed with disappointment, a

vision of fresh delay that made me at first unconscious of my
surprise. It seemed more than a hint that on me as well he would

impose some tiresome condition. Suddenly, while she reported
several more things from his letter, I remembered what he had told

me before going away. He had found Mr. Vereker deliriously
interesting and his own possession of the secret a real

intoxication. The buried treasure was all gold and gems. Now that
it was there it seemed to grow and grow before him; it would have

been, through all time and taking all tongues, one of the most
wonderful flowers of literary art. Nothing, in especial, once you

were face to face with it, could show for more consummately DONE.
When once it came out it came out, was there with a splendour that

made you ashamed; and there hadn't been, save in the bottomless
vulgarity of the age, with every one tasteless and tainted, every

sense stopped, the smallest reason why it should have been
overlooked. It was great, yet so simple, was simple, yet so great,

and the final knowledge of it was an experience quite apart. He
intimated that the charm of such an experience, the desire to drain

it, in its freshness, to the last drop, was what kept him there
close to the source. Gwendolen, franklyradiant as she tossed me

these fragments, showed the elation of a prospect more assured than
my own. That brought me back to the question of her marriage,

prompted me to ask if what she meant by what she had just surprised
me with was that she was under an engagement.

"Of course I am!" she answered. "Didn't you know it?" She seemed
astonished, but I was still more so, for Corvick had told me the

exact contrary. I didn't mention this, however; I only reminded
her how little I had been on that score in her confidence, or even

in Corvick's, and that, moreover I wasn't in ignorance of her
mother's interdict. At bottom I was troubled by the disparity of

the two accounts; but after a little I felt Corvick's to be the one
I least doubted. This simply reduced me to asking myself if the

girl had on the spot improvised an engagement - vamped up an old
one or dashed off a new - in order to arrive at the satisfaction

she desired. She must have had resources of which I was destitute,
but she made her case slightly more intelligible by returning

presently: "What the state of things has been is that we felt of
course bound to do nothing in mamma's lifetime."

"But now you think you'll just dispense with mamma's consent?"
"Ah it mayn't come to that!" I wondered what it might come to, and

she went on: "Poor dear, she may swallow the dose. In fact, you
know," she added with a laugh, "she really MUST!" - a proposition

of which, on behalf of every one concerned, I fully acknowledged
the force.

CHAPTER VIII.
NOTHING more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware

before Corvick's arrival in England that I shouldn't be there to
put him through. I found myself abruptly called to Germany by the

alarming illness of my younger brother, who, against my advice, had
gone to Munich to study, at the feet indeed of a great master, the

art of portraiture in oils. The near relative who made him an
allowance had threatened to withdraw it if he should, under

specious pretexts, turn for superior truth to Paris - Paris being
somehow, for a Cheltenham aunt, the school of evil, the abyss. I

deplored this prejudice at the time, and the deep injury of it was
now visible - first in the fact that it hadn't saved the poor boy,

who was clever, frail and foolish, from congestion of the lungs,
and second in the greater break with London to which the event

condemned me. I'm afraid that what was uppermost in my mind during
several anxious weeks was the sense that if we had only been in

Paris I might have run over to see Corvick. This was actually out
of the question from every point of view: my brother, whose

recovery gave us both plenty to do, was ill for three months,
during which I never left him and at the end of which we had to

face the absoluteprohibition of a return to England. The
consideration of climate imposed itself, and he was in no state to

meet it alone. I took him to Meran and there spent the summer with
him, trying to show him by example how to get back to work and

nursing a rage of another sort that I tried NOT to show him.
The whole business proved the first of a series of phenomena so

strangely interlaced that, taken together - which was how I had to
take them - they form as good an illustration as I can recall of

the manner in which, for the good of his soul doubtless, fate
sometimes deals with a man's avidity. These incidents certainly

had larger bearings than the comparatively meagre consequence we
are here concerned with - though I feel that consequence also a

thing to speak of with some respect. It's mainly in such a light,
I confess, at any rate, that the ugly fruit of my exile is at this

hour present to me. Even at first indeed the spirit in which my
avidity, as I have called it, made me regard that term owed no

element of ease to the fact that before coming back from Rapallo
George Corvick addressed me in a way I objected to. His letter had