We therefore docket it, and hide it in the desk, and we
imagine we have done something. Once again, however, the flame leapt
up out of the ashes, vivid as ever. Once again the thought that he
had been so close to Madge, and that she had yielded to him, touched
him with peculiar tenderness, and it seemed impossible to part
himself from her. To a man with any of the nobler qualities of man
it is not only a sense of honour which binds him to a woman who has
given him all she has to give. Separation seems unnatural,
monstrous, a divorce from himself; it is not she alone, but it is
himself whom he abandons. Frank's duty, too, pointed imperiously to
the path he ought to take, duty to the child as well as to the
mother. He determined to go home, secretly; Mrs Caffyn would not
have written if she had not seen good reason for believing that Madge
still belonged to him. He made up his mind to start the next day,
but when the next day came, instructions to go immediately to Hamburg
arrived from his father. There were rumours of the insolvency of a
house with which Mr Palmer dealt; inquiries were necessary which
could better be made personally, and if these rumours were correct,
as Mr Palmer believed them to be, his agency must be transferred to
some other firm. There was now no possibility of a journey to
England. For a moment he debated whether, when he was at Hamburg, he
could not slip over to London, but it would be dangerous.
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