"You oughtn't to get up yet," he said at length.
"But you'll let me," cried Vane.
"There's a good train in two hours," replied the other briefly. "And the result be upon your own head. . . ."
Vane opened the remainder of his letters on the way up to London. He felt a little dazed and weak, though otherwise perfectly fit, and when he had glanced through them, he stared out of the window at the landscape flashing past. They were passing through the Black Country, and it seemed to him to be in keeping with his thoughts—dour, relentless, grim. The smouldering blast-furnaces, the tall, blackened chimneys, the miles of dingy, squalid houses, all mocked the efforts of their makers to escape.
"You fashioned us," they jeered; "out of your brains we were born, and now you shall serve us evermore. . . . You cannot—you shall not escape. . . ."
To Vane it was all the voice of Fate. "You cannot—you shall not escape. What is to be—is to be; and your puny efforts will not alter a single letter in the book. . . ."
And yet of his own free will he had left Joan; he had brought it on himself.
"What if I had done as she wished?" he demanded aloud. "What would you have done then, you swine?"
But there is no answer in this world to the Might-have-been; only silence and imagination, which, at times, is very merciless.
He stepped out of the train at Euston and drove straight to his rooms. For the first time in his life he took no notice of Binks, and that worthy, knowing that something was wrong, just sat in his basket and waited. Perhaps later he'd be able to help somehow. . . .