The relief with which he hailed the arrival of the post and a budget of letters from England surprised himself.  It struck him that there was something feverish and strange in this waiting for news.  Even to himself he did not dare to define his interest, confessing how greatly he cared.

Lightmark’s epistles just then were frequent and brief.  The marriage was definitely fixed; the Colonel, his uncle, had been liberal beyond his hopes:  a house in Grove Road of some splendour had been taken for the young couple, who were to install themselves there when the honeymoon, involving a sojourn in Paris and a descent into Italy, was done.  Hints of a visit to Rainham followed, which at first he ignored; repeated in subsequent epistles with a greater directness, their prospect filled him with a pleasure so strangely mixed with pain that his pride took alarm.  He thought it necessary to disparage the scheme in a letter to Lightmark, of a coldness which disgusted himself.  Remorse seized him when it had been despatched, and he cherished a hope that it might fail of its aim.  This, however, seemed improbable, when a fortnight had elapsed and it had elicited no reply.  From Lady Garnett, at the tail of one of those long, witty, railing letters, in which the old lady excelled, he heard that the marriage was an accomplished fact, and the birds had flown.  Mrs. Lightmark! the phrase tripped easily from his tongue when he mentioned it at dinner to his neighbour, Mrs. Engel, to whom the persons were known.  Later in his room, face to face with the facts which it signified, he had an intolerable hour.  He had extinguished his candle, and sat, partially undressed, in a mood of singular blankness by the fire of gnarled olive logs, which had smouldered down into one dull, red mass; and Eve’s face was imaged there to his sick fancy as he had seen it last in Dick’s studio in the vague light of an October evening, and yet with a certain new shadow, half sad and half reproachful, in the beautiful eyes.  After all, had he done his best for the child?  Now that this thing was irrevocable and complete, a host of old misgivings and doubts, which he had believed long ago banished, broke in upon him.  He had only asked that she should be happy—­at least, he said, it had never been a question of himself.  He certainly knew nothing to Lightmark’s discredit, nothing which could have justified him in interfering, even if interference could have prevailed.  The two had fallen in love with one another, and, the man not being visibly bad, the marriage had come about; was there more to say?  And yet Rainham’s ill-defined uneasiness still questioned and explored.  A hundred little episodes in his friendship with the brilliant young painter, dismissed as of no import at the time, returned to him—­instances, as it seemed now to his morbid imagination, in which that character, so frank and so enigmatic, rang scarcely true.  And suddenly the tragical story of Kitty Crichton intruded itself before him, with all its