This time he did not look back.


Nor was there any reassurance to be found that night in the concrete
justification of his life. He set himself down to work in vain. One
ghost called up another. The room with its solemn, bloodless
impedimenta became--not a monument to his success, but a Moloch, to
whom everything had been sacrificed--the joy of life, its laughter, its
colour--and Christine. And not only Christine. He had been sacrificed
too.

But he saw Christine most clearly. She sat in the big arm-chair where
his patients waited for his verdict. She wore the big, floppy, black
hat that she had liked best, and the grey hair hung in the old untidy
wisps about her face. The chair was much too big for her. Her little
feet hardly touched the ground. Her hands in the darned gloves were
folded gravely over the shabby bag. He could see her looking about
dimly and hear the clear, small voice.

"How wonderful of you, Robert! How proud your dear father would have
been!"

He fidgeted with the papers on his table, rearranging, re-sorting,
desperately trying not to suffer. But he would have torn the whole
place down in ruins to have remembered that he had given her one day of
happiness.

Well, there had been that one day on Francey's hill--the picnic. She
had liked that. The wood at the bottom, like a silent, deep, green