Two or three days later his place was filled by a stranger, and Flaherty told me that he had left for the Riviera.

All this happened last March at Biarritz.  I never saw him again till three weeks ago.  It was one of those frightfully hot afternoons in July; I had come out of my club, and was walking up St. James’s Street, towards Piccadilly; he was moving in an opposite sense; and thus we approached each other.  He didn’t see me, however, till we had drawn rather near to a conjunction:  then he gave a little start of recognition, his eyes brightened, his pace slackened, his right hand prepared to advance itself—­and I bowed slightly, and pursued my way.  Don’t ask why I did it.  It is enough to confess it without having to explain it.  I glanced backwards, by and by, over my shoulder.  He was standing where I had met him, half turned round, and looking after me.  But when he saw that I was observing him, he hastily shifted about, and continued his descent of the street.

That was only three weeks ago.  Only three weeks ago I still had it in my power to act.  I am sure—­I don’t know why I am sure, but I am sure—­that I could have deterred him.  For all that one can gather from the brief note he left behind, it seems he had no special, definite motive; he had met with no losses, got into no scrape; he was simply tired and sick of life and of himself.  ‘I have no friends,’ he wrote.  ’Nobody will care.  People don’t like me; people avoid me.  I have wondered why; I have tried to watch myself and discover; I have tried to be decent.  I suppose it must be that I emit a repellent fluid; I suppose I am a “bad sort."’ He had a morbid notion that people didn’t like him, that people avoided him!  Oh, to be sure, there were the Bunns and the Krausskopfs and their ilk, plentiful enough:  but he understood what it was that attracted them.  Other people, the people he could have liked, kept their distance—­were civil, indeed, but reserved.  He wanted bread, and they gave him a stone.  It never struck him, I suppose, that they attributed the reserve to him.  But I—­I knew that his reserve was only an effect of his shyness; I knew that he wanted bread:  and that knowledge constituted my moral responsibility.  I didn’t know that his need was extreme; but I have tried in vain to absolve myself with the reflection.  I ought to have made inquiries.  When I think of that afternoon in St. James’s Street—­only three weeks ago—­I feel like an assassin.  The vision of him, as he stopped and looked after me—­I can’t banish it.  Why didn’t some good spirit move me to turn back and overtake him?

It is so hard for the mind to reconcile itself to the irretrievable.  I can’t shake off a sense that there is something to be done.  I can’t realise that it is too late.

CASTLES NEAR SPAIN

I.