I + 

I was quite contented now and assured as to the future. I foreknew the future would be tranquil and lacking in any particular excitement, and I had already ceded, in anticipation, the last tittle of mastery over my own actions; but Bettie would keep me to the mark, would wring⁠—not painlessly perhaps⁠—from Robert Townsend the very best there was in him; and it would be this best which, unalloyed, would endure, in what I wrote. I had never imagined that, for the ore, smelting was an agreeable process; so I shrugged, and faced my future contentedly. + 

One day I said, “Tomorrow I must have holiday. There are certain things that need burying, Bettie dear, and⁠—it is just the funeral of my youth I want to go to.” + 

“So it is tomorrow that we go for an admiring walk around our emotions!” Bettie said. She knew well enough of what event tomorrow was the anniversary, and it is to her credit she added: “Well, for this once⁠—!” For of all the women whom I had loved, there was but one that Bettie Hamlyn had ever bothered about. And tomorrow was Stella’s birthday, as I had very unconcernedly mentioned a few moments earlier, when I was looking for the Austin Dobson book, and had my back turned to Bettie. + 