arranged with Allchin for a week’s absence, greatly to the assistant’s satisfaction.  Before noon he was at The Haws.  But the idea of a family expedition to the seaside could not be carried out:  Mrs. Warburton was not strong enough to leave home, and Jane had just invited a friend to come and spend a week with them.  Disguising as best he could his miserable state of mind and body, Will stayed for a couple of days.  The necessity for detailed lying about his affairs in London—­lying which would long ago have been detected, but for the absolute confidence of his mother and sister, and the retired habits of their life—­added another cause of unrest to those already tormenting him, and he was glad to escape into solitude.  Though with little faith in the remedy, he betook himself to a quiet spot on the coast of Norfolk, associated with memories of holiday in childhood, and there for the rest of the time he had allowed himself did what a man could do to get benefit from sea and sky.

And in these endless hours of solitude there grew upon him a perception of the veritable cause of his illness.  Not loss of station, not overwork, not love; but simply the lie to which he was committed.  There was the root of the matter.  Slowly, dimly, he groped toward the fact that what rendered his life intolerable was its radical dishonesty.  Lived openly, avowedly, it would have involved hardships indeed, but nothing of this dull wretchedness which made the world a desert.  He began to see how much better, how much easier, it would have been to tell the truth two years ago.  His mother was not so weak-minded a woman as to be stricken down by loss of money; and as for Sherwood, his folly merited more than the unpleasantness that might have resulted to him from disclosure.  Grocerdom with a clear conscience would have been a totally different thing from grocerdom surreptitiously embraced.  Instead of slinking into a corner for the performance of an honourable act, he should have declared it, frankly, unaffectedly, to all who had any claim upon him.  At once, the enterprise became amusing, interesting.  If it disgraced him with any of his acquaintances, so much the worse for them; all whose friendship was worth having would have shown only the more his friends; as things stood, he was ashamed, degraded, not by circumstances, but by himself.

To undo it all—?  To proclaim the truth—?  Was it not easy enough?  He had proved now that his business would yield income sufficient for his mother and sister, as well as for his own needs; the crisis was surmounted; why not cast off this load of mean falsehood, which was crushing him to the ground?  By Heaven! he would do so.

Not immediately.  Better wait till he had heard from Jane that their mother was a little stronger, which would probably be the case in a week or two.  But (he declared ill his mind) the resolve was taken.  At the first favourable moment he would undo his folly.  Before taking this step, he must of course announce it to Godfrey Sherwood; an unpleasant necessity; but no matter.