His darling sin

by M. E. Braddon

And then a man at his club told him that Rannock had not been in London that season. He had gone under. He was said to be in America, but that was as might be. He had come to the end of his tether.

It had been a time of agonizing doubt, expiated by almost as agonizing remorse. But it was over now, and life was a dream of bliss—a dream of the fast coming days when Grace Perivale would be his wife, when the evening shadows would bring no parting, the night no loneliness.

Susan Rodney was an ideal third for a pair of lovers, as she had plenty of interests and occupations of her own, spending all her leisure in the composition of a light opera which she had been engaged upon for years, with only a faint hope of ever getting it produced; perhaps in Brussels, perhaps in Frankfort, she dared hardly think of London.

Absorbed in the thrilling delight of a quintette, or a chorus, Sue only gave the lovers her company when they wanted it, which they very often did, as her bright and cheerful spirit harmonized with their own happiness. They both liked her, and were both very sure of her sympathy.

In one of their garden têtes-à-tête, their talk having drifted on to Haldane's famous novel, the one work of fiction which had made his reputation with the general reader, he confessed to having nearly finished a second story.

"I only began it in May," he said, "during a fit of insomnia. My mind was full of scorpions, like Macbeth's, and I think I should have gone mad if I had not summoned those shadows from the unseen world, and set myself to anatomize them. It is a bitter book, a story of Fate's worst irony; and in a better period of English literature—in the day of Scott, or Dickens and Thackeray—it would have stood no chance of being widely read. But we have changed all that. This is the day of cruel books. Most of us have turned our pens into scalpels. And I think this story of mine is cruel enough to hit the public taste."

"There is nothing that touches your life or mine in it?" Grace asked, with a touch of alarm.

"No, no, no; not one thought. I wrote it while I was trying to forget you—and trying still harder to forget myself. The shadows that move in it bear not the faintest resemblance to you or me. It is a sordid book, a study of human meanness, and the misery that dull minds make for themselves: pale-grey miseries that gradually draw to a focus and deepen to blood-red tragedy. But it has one redeeming feature—one really good man—a city missionary, humbly born, plain, self-educated, but a Christ-like character. I should have burnt the book unfinished but for him. He came to my relief when my story and I were sinking into a slough of despond."

"You talk as if the web were not of your weaving, as if you had no power over the figures that move in it."

"I have no such power, Grace. They come to me as mysteriously as the shadows in a dream, and their spell is strong. I cannot create them; and I cannot change them."