That night he came to Chamonix and got lodging in a small hotel on the skirts of the town.  His spirits fell when he entered the room.  He put his pedlar’s pack on the floor and sat down on the narrow bed, suddenly conscious of an enormous fatigue.  His feet burned, his legs ached, his back was raw where the heavy pack had rested.  He thought:  “What am I doing here?  I have nothing but the few hundred pounds Waram gave me.  I’m alone.  Dead and alive.”

He scarcely looked up when the door opened and a young girl came in, carrying a pitcher of water and a coarse towel.  She hesitated and said rather prettily:  “You’ll be tired, perhaps?”

Grimshaw felt within him the tug of the old personality.  He stared at her, suddenly conscious that she was a woman and that she was smiling at him.  Charming, in her way.  Bare arms.  A little black bodice laced over a white waist.  Straight blonde hair, braided thickly and twisted around her head.  A peasant, but pretty....  You see, his desire was to frighten her, as he most certainly would have frightened her had he been true to Cecil Grimshaw.  But the impulse passed, leaving him sick and ashamed.  He heard her saying:  “A sad thing occurred to-day down the valley.  A gentleman....  Salvan ... a very famous gentleman....  And they have telegraphed his wife....  I heard it from Simon Ravanel....  It seems that the gentleman was smashed to bits—­brise en morceau.  Epouvantable, n’est ce pas?”

Grimshaw began to tremble.  “Yes, yes,” he said irritably.  “But I am tired, little one.  Go out, and shut the door!”

The girl gave him a startled glance, frightened at last, but for nothing more than the lost look in his eyes.  He raised his arms, and she fled with a little scream.

Grimshaw sat for a moment staring at the door.  Then with a violent gesture he threw himself back on the bed, buried his face in the dirty pillow and wept as a child weeps, until, just before dawn, he fell asleep....

As far as the public knows, Cecil Grimshaw perished on the “wall”—­perished and was buried at Broadenham beneath a pyramid of chrysanthemums.  Perished, and became an English immortal—­his sins erased by his unconscious sacrifice.  Perished, and was forgiven by Dagmar.  Yet hers was the victory—­he belonged to her at last.  She had not buried his body at Broadenham, but she had buried his work there.  He could never write again....

During those days of posthumous whitewashing he read the papers with a certain contemptuous eagerness.  Some of them he crumpled between his hands and threw away.  He hated his own image, staring balefully from the first page of the illustrated reviews.  He despised England for honouring him.  Once, happening upon a volume of the “Vision of Helen”—­the first edition illustrated by Beardsley—­in a book-stall at Aix-les-Bains, he read it from cover to cover.