It was a rather close afternoon in the third week of May. Fine weather had lasted without a break for more than a fortnight; for the last two or three days there had been little or no breeze; and the inevitable effect had been produced upon London. The streets were a combination of dust, which defied the water-carts; and glare, which seemed to radiate alike from the heavy, smoky-blue sky, the houses, and the pavements. It was only half-past three, and Piccadilly was as yet far from being crowded. The pavement was mainly occupied by the working population, which hurries to and fro along the London streets from morning to night regardless of fashionable hours; and the few representatives of the non-working class—smartly-dressed women and carefully got-up and sauntering men—stood out with peculiar distinctness. But the figure of Dennis Falconer, as he walked westward along the north side of Piccadilly, was conspicuous not only on these rather unenviable terms.

At the first glance it would have seemed that the past eighteen years had altered him considerably, and altered him always for the better; analysed carefully, the alteration resolved itself into a very noticeable increase of maturity and of a certain kind of strength; and the improvement into the fact that his weak points were of a kind to be far less perceptible as such on a mature than on an immature face. His face was thin and very brown; there were worn lines about it which told of physical endurance; and in the sharper chiselling of the whole the thinness of the nose and the narrowness of the forehead were no longer striking. The somewhat self-conscious superiority of his younger days had disappeared under the hand of time, and a certain sternness which had replaced it seemed to give dignity to his expression. The keen steadiness of his eyes had strengthened, and, indeed, it was their expression which helped in a very great degree to make his face so noticeable. He no longer wore a beard, and the firm, square outline of his chin and jaw were visible, while his mouth was hidden by a moustache; iron-grey like his hair. He was very well dressed, but there was that about the simple conventionality of his attire which suggested that its correctness was rather a concession to exterior demands than the expression of personal weakness.

More than one of the people who turned their heads to look at him as he walked down Piccadilly were familiar with that grave, stern face; it had been reproduced lately in the pages of all the illustrated papers, and people glanced at it with the interest created by the appearance in the flesh of something of a celebrity. Falconer had done a great deal of good work for the Geographical Society in the course of the past eighteen years; work characterised by no brilliancy or originality of intellectual resource, but eminently persevering, conscientious, and patient. During the last year, however, a chapter of accidents had conspired to invest the expedition of which he was the leader with a touch of romance and excitement with which his personality would never have endued it. The achievement in which the expedition had resulted had been hailed in England as a national triumph, and Dennis Falconer found himself one of the lions of the moment.

But the position, especially for a man who believed himself to attach no value whatever to it, had been somewhat dearly bought. Falconer, as he walked the London streets on that May afternoon, was trying to realise himself as at home in them, settled among them, perhaps, for an indefinite period; and the effort brought an added shade of gravity to his face. The terrible physical strain of the last six months; a strain the severity of which he had hardly realised at the time, as he endured from day to day with the simple, unimaginative perseverance of a man for whom nerves have no existence; had told even upon his iron constitution; and a couple of great London doctors had condemned him to a year’s inactivity at least, under penalties too grave to be provoked.

He turned down Sloane Street, and another quarter of an hour brought him to number twenty-two, Queen Anne Street. He rang, was admitted, and ushered upstairs into the drawing-room.

The room was empty, and Falconer walked across it, glancing about him with those keen, habitually observant eyes of his, and on his face there was something of the stiffness and reserve which had characterised his voice a minute earlier as he asked for Mrs. Romayne.

Until the night, now nearly a fortnight ago, when they had met in Lady Bracondale’s drawing-room, Dennis Falconer had seen Mrs. Romayne only once since their journey from Nice had ended in old Mr. Falconer’s house. That one occasion had been his visit to his uncle—so called—in his Swiss home in the second year of Mrs. Romayne’s widowhood.

He had been in Europe several times since then and had always made a point of visiting old Mr. Falconer, but on every subsequent occasion it had happened—rather strangely, as he had thought to himself once or twice—that Mrs. Romayne was away from home. After old Mr. Falconer’s death communication between them occurred only at the rarest intervals. Dennis Falconer was Mrs. Romayne’s only remaining relation, and in this capacity had been left by her uncle one of her trustees; but any necessary business was transacted by his fellow trustee—old Mr. Falconer’s lawyer. But the clan instinct was very strong in Falconer; it brought in its wake a whole set of duties and obligations which for most men are non-existent; and the sense of duty which had been characteristic of him in early manhood had only been more deeply—and narrowly—engraved by every succeeding year.

Arrived in London, and knowing Mrs. Romayne to be settled there, he had considered it incumbent on him to call on her, and had written the note which she had received nearly a fortnight ago. He had written it with much the same expression on his face—only a little less pronounced, perhaps—as rested on it now that he was waiting for Mrs. Romayne in her own drawing-room. Through all the changes brought about by the passing of eighteen years, the mental attitude produced in him towards Mrs. Romayne during those weeks of dual solitude at Nice had remained almost untouched, except inasmuch as its disapproval had been accentuated by everything he had heard of her since. It had been vivified and rendered, as it were, tangible and definite by the short interview at Lady Bracondale’s party, which had made her a reality instead of a remembrance to him.

He was standing before a large and very admirable photograph of Julian—Julian at his very best and most attractive—contemplating it with a heavy frown, when the door behind him opened under a light, quick touch, and Mrs. Romayne came into the room.

“It is too shocking to have kept you waiting!” she said. “So glad to see you! I gave myself too much shopping to do, and I have had quite a fearful rush!”

Her voice and manner were very easy, very conventionally cordial; and, as it seemed to Falconer, there was not a natural tone or movement about her. It was her “at home” afternoon, and she was charmingly dressed in something soft and pale-coloured; her eyes were very bright, and the play of expression on her face was even more vivacious and effective than usual—exaggeratedly so, even.

She shook hands and pointed him to a seat, sinking into a chair herself with an affectation of hard-won victory over the “fearful rush”; the subtle assumption of the most superficial society relation as alone existing between them was as insidious and as indefinable as it had been on their previous meeting, and seemed to set the key-note of the situation even before she spoke again.

“It is a frightful season!” she said. “Really horribly busy! They say it is to be a short one—I am sure I trust it is true, if we are any of us to be left alive at the end—and everything seems to be crammed into a few weeks. Don’t you think so? You are very lucky to have arrived half-way through.”

“London just now does not seem to be a particularly desirable place, certainly,” answered Falconer; his manner was very formal and reserved, a great contrast to her apparent ease.

“No!” she said, lifting her eyebrows with a smile. “Now, that sounds rather ungrateful in you, do you know, for London finds you a very desirable visitor. One hears of you everywhere.”

“I am afraid I must confess that I take very little pleasure in going ‘everywhere,’” returned Falconer stiffly. “Social life in London seems to me to have altered for the worse in every direction, since I last took part in it.”

“And yet you go out a great deal!” with a laugh. “That sounds a trifle inconsistent!”

“I am not sufficiently egotistical to imagine that my individual refusal to countenance it would have any effect upon society,” answered Falconer, still more stiffly. “To tolerate is by no means to approve.”

Falconer’s reasons for the toleration in question—the real reasons, of which he himself was wholly unconscious—would have astonished him not a little, if he could have brought himself to realise them, in their narrow conventionality. Fortunately it did not occur to Mrs. Romayne to ask for them. With the ready tact of a woman of the world she turned the conversation with a gracefully worded question as to his recent expedition. He answered it with the courteous generality—only rather more gravely spoken—with which he had answered a great many similar questions put to him during the past week by ladies to whom he had been introduced in his capacity of momentary celebrity; and she passed on from one point to another with the superficial interest evoked by one of the topics of the hour. Her exaggerated comments and questions, more or less wide of the mark, were exhausted at length, and a moment’s pause followed; a fact that indicated, though Falconer did not know it, that the preceding conversation had involved some kind of strain on the bright little woman who had kept it up so vivaciously. The pause was broken by Falconer.

“You have heard,” he said, “of poor Thomson’s illness?”

It would hardly be true to say that Mrs. Romayne started—even slightly—but a curious kind of flush seemed to pass across her face. As she answered, both her voice and her manner seemed instinctively to increase and emphasize that distance which she had tacitly set between them; it was as though the introduction into the conversation of a name their mutual familiarity with which represented mutual interests and connections had created the instinct in her.

“Yes, poor man!” she said carelessly. “There has been a good deal of illness about this season, somehow.”

“I am afraid it is a bad business,” went on Falconer, with no comprehension of the turn she had given to the conversation, and with his mental condemnation of what seemed to him simple heartlessness on her part not wholly absent from his voice. “There was to be a consultation to-day; and I shall call this evening to hear the result. But I am afraid there is very slender hope.”

“How very sad!” said Mrs. Romayne with polite interest.

Falconer bent his head in grave assent, and then with a view to arousing in her shallow nature—as it seemed to him—some remembrance at least of the usefulness to her of the man whose probable death she contemplated so carelessly, he said with formal courtesy:

“Thomson has done all the work connected with our joint trusteeship so admirably hitherto that there has been no need for my services. But if, while he is ill, you should find yourself in want of his aid in that capacity, I need not say that I am entirely at your command.”

Again that curious flush passed across Mrs. Romayne’s face, leaving it rather pale this time.

“Thanks, so much!” she said quickly. “I really could not think of troubling you. I’ve no doubt I shall be able to hold on until Mr. Thomson is well again. Thanks immensely! You will not be within reach for very long, I suppose?”

“I shall be in London for a year, certainly,” answered Falconer, acknowledging her tacit refusal to recognise any claim on him in the formal directness of his reply. Then, as she uttered a sharp little exclamation of surprise, he added briefly; “I am in the doctors’ hands, unfortunately. There is something wrong with me, they say.”

“I am very sorry——” she began prettily, though her eyes were rather hard and preoccupied. But at that moment the door opened to admit an influx of visitors, and Falconer rose to go.

“So glad to have seen you!” she said as she turned to him after welcoming the new-comers. “You won’t have a cup of tea? It is always rather crushing when a man refuses one’s tea, isn’t it, Mrs. Anson?” turning as she spoke to a lady sitting close by. Then as she gave him her hand, speaking in a tone which still included the other lady in the conversation, she alluded for the first time to Julian. The whole call had gone by without one of those references to “my boy” with which all Mrs. Romayne’s acquaintances were so familiar, that such an omission under the circumstances would have been hardly credible to any one of them.

“I’m so sorry you have missed my boy!” she said now with her apologetic laugh. “I’m afraid I am absurdly proud of him—isn’t that so, dear Mrs. Anson?—but he really is a dear fellow.”

“He is going to the bar, I believe?” said Falconer; his face and voice alike were uncompromisingly stern and unbending.

“Yes!” answered Julian’s mother. “He is not clever, dear boy, but I hope he may do fairly well. Good-bye! Shall you be at the Gordons’ to-night? We are going first to see the American actor they rave about so. A funny little domestic party—I and my son and my son’s new and particular ‘chum.’ Good-bye!”

Mrs. Romayne’s face did not regain its normal colour as she turned her attention to her other callers, nor did those faint lines about her mouth and eyes disappear. She was particularly charming that afternoon, but always, as she welcomed one set of visitors or parted from another, laughing, talking or listening so gaily, there was a faint, hardly definable air of preoccupation about her. She had a great many visitors, and the afternoon grew hotter as it wore on. When she dressed for dinner that night, finding herself strangely nervous, irritable with her maid, and “on edge altogether,” as she expressed it, she was very definite and distinct in her self-assurances that such an unusual state of things was owing solely to the heat and “those tiresome people”; rather unnecessarily distinct and explicit it would have seemed, since there was apparently no chance of contradiction.

The acquaintanceship between Julian and Marston Loring had developed during the past fortnight with surprising rapidity. They had dined together at the club, they had smoked together in Loring’s chambers, and they had met incessantly at dances, “at homes,” or dinners, on all of which occasions Mrs. Romayne had been uniformly gracious to her son’s friend.

At a garden-party a few miles out of London, admittedly the greatest failure of the season, when Loring and the Romaynes had walked about together all the afternoon with that carelessness of social obligations which a dull party is apt to engender, the scheme for the present evening had been arranged; Loring adding a preliminary dinner at a restaurant, with himself in the capacity of host to Mrs. Romayne and her son, to the original suggestion that they should go together to the theatre.

Julian was in high spirits as they drove off to keep their engagement, but his mother’s responses to his chatter were neither so ready nor so bright as usual. He glanced at her once or twice and then said boyishly:

“You look awfully done up, mother!”

Mrs. Romayne turned to him quickly, her eyes sparkling angrily, her whole face looking irritable and annoyed.

“My dear Julian,” she said sharply, “it’s a very bad habit to be constantly commenting on people’s appearance; especially when your remarks are uncomplimentary. You told me I looked tired the other day. Please don’t do it again!”

Such an ebullition of temper was an almost unheard-of thing with Mrs. Romayne, and Julian could only stare at her in helpless astonishment—not hurt, but simply surprised, and inclined to be resentful. He could not realise as a woman might have done the jarred, quivering state of nerves implied in such an outbreak; and he simply thought his mother was rather odd, when a moment later she stretched out her hand hastily, and laid it on his with a quick, tight squeeze.

“That was abominably cross, dear!” she said in a voice which shook. “Don’t mind! I am all right now.”

But she was not all right, and though she made a valiant effort to collect her forces and appear so, her gaiety throughout dinner was strained and forced. Loring’s quick perception realised instantly that something was wrong with her, and his demeanour under the circumstances was significant at once of the work of the past fortnight, and of his individual capacity for turning everything to his own ends. With a tacit assumption of a certain right to consider her, he evinced just such a delicate appreciation of her mood as gave her a sense of rest and soothing, without letting her feel for a moment that he found anything wanting in her. His pose was always that of a man to whom youth or even early manhood, with its follies and inexperiences, is a thing of the dim past, and he used that pose now to the utmost advantage; combining a mental equality with the mother with an actual equality with the son as his contemporary in a manner which made him seem in a very subtle way equally the friend of each. He talked, of course, almost exclusively to Mrs. Romayne, never, however, failing to include Julian in the conversation; and he so managed the conversation as to take all its trouble on his own shoulders, and give Mrs. Romayne little to do but listen and be entertained.

He succeeded so well that the dinner-hour, by the time it was over, had done the work of many days in advancing his dawning intimacy with Mrs. Romayne.

She felt better, she told herself as they entered the theatre—told herself with rather excessive eagerness and satisfaction, perhaps because of something within, of which the quick, nervous movement of her hands as she unfastened her cloak was the outward and visible sign.

The curtain was just going up as they seated themselves, and during the first quarter of an hour the two seats to their left remained empty. Then Mrs. Romayne, whose attention was by no means chained to the stage, became aware of the slow and difficult approach of a flow of loudly-whispered and apologetic conversation, combined with the large person of a lady; and a moment or two later she was being fallen over by Mrs. Halse, who was followed by a girl, and who continued to explain the situation fluently and audibly, until a distinct expression of the opinion of the pit caused her to subside temporarily.

She began to talk again before the applause on the fall of the curtain had died away, and her voice reached Mrs. Romayne, to whom her remarks were addressed, across the girl who was with her, and Julian, who was sitting on his mother’s left hand, with gradually increasing distinctness.

“So curious that our seats should be together!” were the first words Mrs. Romayne heard. “I have just been meeting a connection of yours. The explorer, you know—Dennis Falconer. So fascinating! Oh, by-the-bye—my cousin. I don’t think she has had the pleasure of being introduced to you, though she has met your son. Miss Hilda Newton—Mrs. Romayne.”

Miss Hilda Newton was a very pretty, dark girl of a somewhat pronounced type. She had large, perceptive, black eyes, singularly unabashed; a charming little turned-up nose; and a rather large mouth with a good deal of shrewd character about it. She was understood to be a country cousin of Mrs. Halse’s, with whom she had been staying for the last three weeks; but only a very critical and rather unkind eye could have traced the country cousin in her dress, which had a great deal of style and dash about it. She acknowledged Mrs. Halse’s introduction of her with rather excessive self-possession, and after a casual word or two to Mrs. Romayne, addressed herself to Julian; it was she with whom he had disappeared to supper at Lady Bracondale’s “at home,” and they had evidently seen a good deal of one another in the interval.

Mrs. Romayne had noticed them together more than once, and she had taken a dislike to Miss Newton’s pretty, independent face and manners. In her present mood it was an absolute relief to her to find in the girl a legitimate excuse for irritation, and a reason for the fact that Mrs. Halse’s speech had somehow undone all the work of the early part of the evening, and set her nerves on edge afresh.

“Detestably bad style!” she said to herself angrily, giving an unheeding ear to Mrs. Halse as she watched Miss Newton reply with a little twirl of her fan to an eager question of Julian’s. “Just what one would expect in a cousin of that woman.” Then she became aware that “that woman” was vociferously insisting on changing places with Julian, and that Julian was acceding to the proposition with considerable alacrity; and before she had well realised exactly what the change involved, Mrs. Halse, with much paraphernalia of smelling-bottle, fan, opera-glasses, and programme, was established at her side, and Julian and Miss Newton were seated together at the end of the row, practically isolated by the stream of Mrs. Halse’s conversation.

“So horrid to talk across people, isn’t it?” said that lady airily, though no crowd ever collected would have interfered with her flow of language. “This is much more comfortable. My dear Mrs. Romayne, I am simply dying to rave to somebody about your cousin—he is your cousin, isn’t he?—Mr. Falconer, you know. What a splendid man! Of course all the accounts of his work have been most fascinating, but the man himself makes it all seem so much more real, don’t you know. Now, do tell me, is he your first cousin, and do you remember him when he was quite a little boy, and all that sort of thing?”

Mrs. Romayne took up her fan and unfurled it. She was looking past Mrs. Halse at Julian and Miss Newton, who were looking over the same programme with their heads rather close together. Her eyebrows were slightly contracted, and her eyes very bright, and the restless movements of the slender hand that held the fan seemed to be an expression of intense inward irritation.

“Oh dear, no; Dennis Falconer is not my first cousin, by any means!” she said carelessly, though her voice was a trifle sharp. “Third or fourth, or something of that kind.”

“He is quite a hero, isn’t he?” said Mrs. Halse, gushingly addressing Loring. “Have you met him?”

Loring, though his glance had every appearance of perfect carelessness, was watching Mrs. Romayne intently. He had noticed her access of nervous irritability, and he was curious as to the cause. Was it her son’s flirtation with Miss Newton? Was it dislike to Mrs. Halse? Or had it any connection with Dennis Falconer? He had his reasons for a study of Mrs. Romayne’s idiosyncrasies.

“Yes,” he said. “I met him the other night. A good sort of fellow he seemed.”

“He’s magnificent!” said Mrs. Halse enthusiastically. “We must have him at the bazaar, my dear Mrs. Romayne; that I am quite determined. If he would sell African trophies for us, you know—a native’s tooth, or poppy-heads—oh, arrow-heads, is it?—well anything of that sort—it would be a fortune to us! Have you seen a great deal of him? Cousins are so often just like brothers and sisters, are they not?”

A low laugh and a toss of her head from Miss Newton at this moment closed the perusal of the programme, and Julian turned his attention to perusing the pretty black eyes instead. Mrs. Romayne’s lips seemed to tighten and whiten, and the fingers which held the fan were tightly clenched as she answered in a voice which rang hard in spite of her efforts:

“Sometimes they are, of course. But it depends so much on circumstances. Dennis Falconer and I had not met for years until the other day.”

At that moment the curtain went up, leaving Mrs. Halse literally with her mouth open, and the instant it fell Mrs. Romayne leant across to Miss Newton with a comment on the performance, spoken in a rather thin, tense voice, and with eyes that glittered as though the nervous strain under which the speaker was labouring was becoming almost insupportable. Apparently something in her face repelled the girl, for her answer was of the briefest, and Julian throwing himself into the breach, he and Miss Newton were instantly absorbed in an animated discussion. It was a long wait, and Loring, noting every one of the restless movements of the woman by his side as she talked and laughed so sharply, understood that to Mrs. Romayne every moment meant nervous torture. The instant the green curtain fell on the third act she rose, and Loring followed her example, and wrapped her quickly and deftly in her cloak.

“I can’t say I think much of your American prodigy,” she said to him with a forced laugh. “I must confess that he has bored me to such an extent that I really can’t stand any more boredom, and shall go straight home. Julian!”

She glanced round for him as she spoke, but he was escorting Mrs. Halse and her cousin, and she was waiting for him in her brougham before he joined her.

“Suppose you come to the club with me?” suggested Loring carelessly, as Julian received his mother’s announcement of her intentions rather blankly. “What do you say to a game of billiards?”

“All right,” responded Julian. “Thanks, old fellow. It was only that I told Miss Newton we were coming on. Isn’t she a jolly girl, mother?”

Mrs. Romayne smiled.

“Very pretty indeed,” she said lightly. “It’s a sad pity you’re such an ineligible fellow, isn’t it?”

And Loring, as the carriage drove off, said to himself admiringly: “What a wonderfully clever woman!”

Reaction from a heavy strain—even, apparently, if it is only the strain of combating exhaustion engendered by heat—is a terrible thing. When Mrs. Romayne got out of her carriage after her long drive, her face was haggard and drawn. She passed into the house, gathered up mechanically, and without a glance, two letters waiting for her on the hall-table; told the maid who was waiting for her that she might go to bed, and went up into the drawing-room.

There was a low chair by a little table covered with dainty, useless paraphernalia, which she particularly affected. She sat down in it now, almost unconsciously as it seemed, without even loosening her cloak, and with a long, low sigh; the moments passed, and still she sat there, a curious grey pallor about her face, her eyes gazing straight before her as though they were looking into the future or the past. At last, as if by a sudden fierce effort of will, she roused herself and began to tear open the letters still in her hand as if with a desperate instinct towards occupying her thoughts.

Her eyes fell on the letter by this time open in her hand, and she read it almost unconsciously, taking in the sense gradually as she read:

With a sudden fierce gesture, of which her small white fingers looked hardly capable, Mrs. Romayne crushed the letter in her hand and lifted her head.

“To be thrown upon him!” she said in a curious, breathless tone. “To have to come into contact—close contact, personal contact—with him!”