him a trick. He was to be their transitory sport, as many a
better man he could himself recollect had been before him. He
would go home and give in; let Sheila do with him what she
pleased. No one but a lunatic could have acted as he had, with
just that frantic hint of method so remarkable in the insane.

He left the common. A lamplighter was lighting the lamps. A thin
evening haze was on the air. If only he had stayed at home that
fateful afternoon! Who, what had induced him, enticed him to
venture out? And even with the thought welled up into his mind an
intense desire to go to the old green time-worn churchyard again;
to sit there contentedly alone, where none heeded the completest
metamorphosis, down beside the yew-trees. What a fool he had
been. There alone, of course, lay his only possible chance of
recovery. He would go to-morrow. Perhaps Sheila had not yet
discovered his absence; and there would be no difficulty in
repeating so successful a stratagem.

Remembrance of his miserable mistake, of Miss Sinnet, faintly
returned to him as he swiftly mounted the steps to his porch.
Poor old lady. He would make amends for his discourtesy when he
was quite himself again. She should some day hear, perhaps, his
infinitely tragic, infinitely comic experience from his own lips.
He would take her some flowers, some old keepsake of his mother's.
What would he not do when the old moods and brains of the stupid
Arthur Lawford, whom he had appreciated so little and so
superficially, came back to him.

He ran up the steps and stopped dead, his hand in his pocket,
chilled and aghast. Sheila had taken his keys. He stood there,