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She, on her side, was no less ardent for the great step. She raged against the world’s law, the injustice by which a husband’s cruelty was not sufficient ground for divorce. ‘But we finer souls must take the law into our own hands,’ she wrote. ‘We must teach society that the ethics of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century of enlightenment.’ But somehow the actual time and place of the elopement could never get itself fixed. In September her husband dragged her to Scotland, in October after the pheasants. When the dramatic day was actually fixed, Winifred wrote by the next post deferring it for a week. Even the few actual preliminary meetings they planned for Kensington Gardens or Hampstead Heath rarely came off. He lived in a whirling atmosphere of express letters of excuse, and telegrams that transformed the situation from hour to hour. Not that her passion in any way abated, or her romantic resolution really altered: it was only that her conception of time and place and ways and means was dizzily mutable.

But after nigh six months of palpitating negotiations with the adorable Mrs. Glamorys, the poet, in a moment of dejection, penned the prose apophthegm, ‘It is of no use trying to change a changeable person.’

V

But at last she astonished him by a sketch plan of the elopement, so detailed, even to band-boxes and the Paris night route via Dieppe, that no further room for doubt was left in his intoxicated soul, and he was actually further astonished when, just as he was putting his hand-bag into the hansom, a telegram was handed to him saying: ‘Gone to Homburg. Letter follows.’

He stood still for a moment on the pavement in utter distraction. What did it mean? Had she failed him again? Or was it simply that she had changed the city of refuge from Paris to Homburg? He was about to name the new station to the cabman, but then, ‘letter follows’. Surely that meant that he was to wait for it. Perplexed and miserable, he stood with the telegram crumpled up in his fist. What a ridiculous situation! He had wrought himself up to the point of breaking with the world and his past, and now–it only remained to satisfy the cabman!

He tossed feverishly all night, seeking to soothe himself, but really exciting himself the more by a hundred plausible explanations. He was now strung up to such a pitch of uncertainty that he was astonished for the third time when the ‘letter’ did duly ‘follow’.

* * * * *

‘Dearest,’ it ran, ‘as I explained in my telegram, my husband became suddenly ill’–(‘if she had only put that in the telegram,’ he groaned)–‘and was ordered to Homburg. Of course it was impossible to leave him in this crisis, both for practical and sentimental reasons. You yourself, darling, would not like me to have aggravated his illness by my flight just at this moment, and thus possibly have his death on my conscience.’ (‘Darling, you are always right,’ he said, kissing the letter.) ‘Let us possess our souls in patience a little longer. I need not tell you how vexatious it will be to find myself nursing him in Homburg–out of the season even–instead of the prospect to which I had looked forward with my whole heart and soul. But what can one do? How true is the French proverb, ‘Nothing happens but the unexpected’! Write to me immediately Poste Restante, that I may at least console myself with your dear words.’

The unexpected did indeed happen. Despite draughts of Elizabeth-brunnen and promenades on the Kurhaus terrace, the stalwart woman beater succumbed to his malady. The curt telegram from Winifred gave no indication of her emotions. He sent a reply-telegram of sympathy with her trouble. Although he could not pretend to grieve at this sudden providential solution of their life-problem, still he did sincerely sympathize with the distress inevitable in connection with a death, especially on foreign soil.