He wrenched open the drawer of his writing-table, and scooped up in his hands some trifles of faded ribbon and trinkets of gold--things that he treasured, none knew why or for what--and holding them thus, looked down on them and laughed, bitterly and savagely, as though a devil were within him.
"Me! She scorns me!" he said, and laughed again, and flung them all back and shut the drawer upon them.

And presently he knew that he held her all the higher because she did scorn him; because her life was such that she _could_ scorn him; and the bitterness dropped out of him, his eyes softened, and though he still laughed, it was for an utterly different reason, and in a wholly different way.
Some pots of tulips and mignonette stood on the ledge of his window.

He walked over to see that they were watered before he went to bed.

And between the time when he got down on his knees to fish out his bath-slippers from beneath the bed-stead and the creak of the springs when he lay down for the night, he was so long and so still that one might have believed he was doing something else.
He slept long, and rose in the morning soothed and subdued in spirit--better and brighter in every way; for now no affair, for The Yard hampered his movements and claimed his time.

He was free; he was back in the Town--beautiful because it contained her--and he might hark back to the old trick of watching and following and being close to her without her knowledge.
It was a vain hope that, however.