Now, he said to himself, he would think no more; he would act.  The long talk with Lord Evelyn had enabled him to pull himself together; there would be no repetition of that half-hysterical collapse.  More than one of his officer-friends had confessed to him that they had spent the night before their first battle in abject terror, but that that had all gone off as soon as they were called into action.  And as for himself, he had many things to arrange before starting on this hunting-expedition, which was to serve as a cloak for another enterprise.  He would have to write at once, for example, to his sister—­an invalid widow, who passed her life alternately on the Riviera and in Switzerland—­informing her of his intended travels.  He would have to see that a sufficient sum was left for Natalie’s mother, and put into discreet hands.  The money for the man Kirski would have to be properly tied up, lest it should prove a temptation.  Why, those two pieces of Italian embroidery lying there, he had bought them months ago, intending to present them to Natalie, but from time to time the opportunity had been missed.  And so forth, and so forth.

But despite all this fortitude, and these commonplace and practical considerations, his eyes would wander to that little handful of flowers lying on the table, and his thoughts would wander farther still.  As he pictured to himself his going to the young Hungarian girl, and taking her hand, and telling her that now it was no longer a parting for a couple of years, but a parting forever, his heart grew cold and sick.  He thought of her terrified eyes, of her self-reproaches, of her entreaties, perhaps.

“I wish Evelyn would tell her,” he murmured aloud, and he went to the window.  “Surely it would be better if I were never to see her again.”

It was a long and agonizing night, despite all his resolutions.  The gray morning, appearing palely over the river and the bridges, found him still pacing up and down there, with nothing settled at all, no letter written, no memoranda made.  All that the night had done was to increase a hundred-fold his dread of meeting Natalie.  And now the daylight only told him that that interview was coming nearer.  It had become a question of hours.

At last, worn out with fatigue and despair, he threw himself on a couch hard by, and presently sunk into a broken and troubled sleep.  For now the mind, emancipated from the control of the will, ran riot; and the quick-changing pictures that were presented to him were full of fearful things that shook his very life with terror.  Awake he could force himself to think of this or that; asleep, he was at the mercy of this lurid imagination that seemed to dye each successive scene in the hue of blood.  First of all, he was in a great cathedral, sombre and vast, and by the dim light of the candles he saw that some solemn ceremony was going forward.  Priests, mitred and robed, sat in a semicircle in front of the altar;