that I’d got malignant disease of the heart, might die at any moment, and in any case couldn’t live more than a few years.  He said:  ’I thought you’d like to know, so that you could arrange your life accordingly.’  I thanked him.  I was really most awfully obliged to him.  It wanted some pluck to tell me.  He said:  ’I wouldn’t admit to anyone else that I’d told you.’  I never admired Darcy more than I did that night.  His tone was so finely casual.

In something like a month I had got used to the idea of being condemned to death.  At any rate, it ceased to interfere with my sleep.  I purchased a vault for myself in Brompton Cemetery.  Then I took this flat that I’m talking in now, and began deliberately to think over how I should finish my life.  I’d got money—­much more than old Ravengar imagined—­and I’m a bit of a philosopher, you know; I have my theories as to what constitutes real living.  However, I won’t bother you with those.  I expect they’re pretty crude, after all.  Besides, my preparations were all knocked on the head.  I saw Camilla Payne again in Hugo’s.  She had stopped typewriting, and was a milliner there.  I tried my level best to strike up an intimacy with her, but I failed.  She wouldn’t have it.  The fact is, I was too rich and showy.  And I had a reputation behind me which, possibly—­well, you’re aware of all that, Polycarp.  In about a fortnight I worshipped her—­yes, I did actually worship her.  I would have done anything she ordered me, except leave her alone; and that I wouldn’t do.  I dare say I might have got into a sort of friendship with her if she’d had any home, any relatives, any place to receive me in.  But what can a girl do with nothing but a bed-sitting-room?  I asked her to go up the river; I asked her to dinner and to lunch, and to bring her friends with her; I even asked her to go with me to an A.B.C. shop, but she wouldn’t.  She was quite right, in a general way.  How could she guess I wasn’t like the rest, or like what I had been?

Once, when she let me walk with her from Hugo’s down to Walham Green, I nearly went mad with joy.  I think I verily was mad for a time.  I used to take out licenses for our marriage, and I used to buy clothes for her—­heaps of clothes, in case.  Yes, I was as good as mad then.  And when she made it clear that this walking by my side was nothing at all, meant nothing, and must be construed as nothing, I grew still more mad.

At last I wrote to her that if she didn’t call and see me at my flat, I should blow my brains out.  I didn’t expect her to call, and I did expect that I should blow my brains out.  I was ready to do so.  A year more or a year less on this earth—­what did it matter to me?

Some people may think—­you may think, Polycarp—­that a man like me, under sentence of death from a doctor, had no right to make love to a woman.  That may be so.  But in love there isn’t often any question of right.  Human instincts have no regard for human justice, and when the instinct is strong enough, the sense of justice simply ceases to exist for it.  When you’re in love—­enough—­you don’t argue.  You desire—­that’s all.