the flap and addressed it. Then, leaning back in his chair, he sighed his relief.
For the next half-hour his pen moved rapidly over the paper. Letter after letter was written, read and approved. He was engaged in putting his house in order.
He found himself regarding everything with a strange air of detachment. It was as if it all concerned another rather than himself. Lola had gone out of his life—nothing really mattered now.
It was futile to indulge in vain regrets. There had been a time when he felt that Fate had played him a scurvy trick in bringing Lola into his life at a time when she could mean nothing to him; but that was past. Now he was able to regard everything in its just relation to his own destiny.
It was strange how easily the mind seemed to adjust itself to new conditions. He remembered how in France his first instinct had been one of fear, then had come indifference, a soul-numbing fatalism, finally caution, a sort of gun-shyness that had come with the full realisation of the awfulness of it all. Would the same mental processes manifest themselves now? He was certainly in the indifferent stage. It would be horrible if, at the last moment, he were to hesitate. No, he must cut his loss and clear out.
"Dropping down the river on a nine-knot tide." Somewhere he remembered having read the line. He had been struck with it at the time, now it possessed for him a very special significance. At half-
