The oppressive autumn weather continued for the next week and more, but the atmosphere in the house at Chelsea gradually cleared; at least, the electrical disturbances which had, as a matter of fact, culminated in Julian’s departure for the club, subsided. As the days went on, Julian gradually recovered his spirits. His temper, which had given way so suddenly and completely under the strain put upon it by the unprecedented thwarting to which he had been subjected, recovered its careless easiness. The injured expression of moodiness disappeared wholly from his face, and his manner resumed its buoyancy.

Nevertheless, the life of the present autumn was by no means the life of the past spring. Partly, of course, the different framework was responsible; life, especially at this particular moment, when winter society was as yet hardly formed, consisted by no means wholly of a social existence. It was, in fact, distinctly “slack” and heavy on social lines as compared with the high pressure of the season; and the introduction into the routine of life of a certain number of hours of regular work on Julian’s part—the first practical acknowledgement in the house in Queen Anne Street, that work had anything to do with life—could not fail to alter the tone to some extent. But there was a subtle change in Julian himself, which was hardly to be accounted for on such broad lines. He had recovered his normal mental temperature, indeed, but the interval of disturbance seemed to have had some indefinable effect upon him. He had recovered himself—but it was himself with a difference. It was almost impossible to narrow the difference into words. To say that he was colder to his mother, or that he stood deliberately aloof from her, would not have been true. But there was a touch of independence about his whole personality which was new to it; a certain suggestion of a separate life and separate interests, such as must inevitably come to a man sooner or later, which seemed to tinge his intercourse with her—superficially the same as it remained—with something of carelessness, and even a hint of unconscious patronage.

If the change was felt by Mrs. Romayne, she made no sign; or, at least, entered no protest. After the little explanation which had taken place in the railway carriage she had utterly ignored the cloud which his moodiness had created; and she ignored its passing away. When Julian was at home she was always bright and pleasant; always charmed to have him with her; always ready to let him go. Her little jokes at his expense in his new character of a worker were full of tact. Her playful allusions to her own solitary days were always light and gay. Nevertheless, the characteristics which the ten weeks of their absence from town had brought to her face grew and intensified during the ten days that followed their return. Her eyes grew more restless, her mouth more sensitive, as though the strained, sharpened look of anxiety which haunted her face during the hour which preceded Julian’s return, and during the whole evening, when, as happened several times in the course of that ten days, he dined out, went deep enough to leave lasting tokens of its presence. Her questions as to his work, and the new friends, the new haunts, consequent upon it, seemed to come from her lips—far less self-confident in expression in these days—almost in spite of herself. They were always uttered with a playfulness which hardly masked a slight nervousness underneath; a nervousness which seemed to be a reminiscence of that first evening.

She was sitting alone in her drawing-room one afternoon towards the end of the second week of their return; she had a book in her hand, and a tea-table before her. But she had neither poured herself out any tea, nor could she be said to be reading. Every two or three minutes her attention seemed to wander; her eyes would stray vaguely about the room, and she would rise and move restlessly across it, to give some wholly unnecessary touch to a drapery or a glass of flowers. Once she had seated herself at her writing-table to begin a trivial note; but the impulse had failed to carry her through, and she had returned to her chair and her book. It was half-past four, and she was expecting Julian. He had dined out on three consecutive nights, and was doing so again to-night. And in reply to her laughing protest against “never seeing him,” he had promised carelessly to come home and have afternoon tea with her.

The door-bell rang at last, and as the drawing-room door opened she lifted a smiling face with a gaily approving comment on his punctuality.

“Good boy!” she began. Then she broke off and laughed lightly, though the brightness of her face suddenly ceased to be genuine.

The figure on the threshold was that of Marston Loring.

“Thank you,” he said; “I am glad you think so!”

“The observation was not intended for you, I’m sorry to tell you,” returned Mrs. Romayne, as she rose to receive him. “And I’m afraid even if I applied it to you, you would hardly condescend to accept it. How do you do? When did you come back? Sit down and let me give you some tea.”

Loring sat down accordingly, with a mute witness in his manner of doing so to a certain amount of intimacy both with the room and its mistress; but that touch of admiring deference which had marked his demeanour during the early stages of his acquaintance with Mrs. Romayne, was still present with him, and was rendered only the more effective by the familiarity with which it was now combined.

“Thanks,” he said; “a cup of tea is a capital idea. But I don’t think it’s quite kind of you to say that I wouldn’t condescend to the epithet, ‘Good boy.’ I should like to have it applied to me of all things. It would be such a novelty, and so wholly undeserved!”

He spoke in that tone of sardonic daring on which a great deal of his social reputation rested, and Mrs. Romayne answered with a laugh.

“No doubt it would,” she said, with that very slight and unreal assumption of reproof with which such a woman invariably treats the tacit confessions of a man of Loring’s reputation. “You only want the epithet, then, because you know you don’t deserve it.”

She handed him the tea as she spoke with a shake of her head, and added:

“But tell me, now, when did you come back, and where have you been?”

“I’ve been to the Engadine,” he answered; “why, I don’t know, unless that for six weeks, at least, of my life I might fully appreciate the charms of London! I don’t admire glaciers; snow mountains bore me; altitudes are always more or less wearisome; and society au naturel is not to be tolerated. I reached town the day before yesterday.”

Marston Loring was faultlessly dressed. It was impossible to associate his attire with anything but Piccadilly and the best clubs and the best drawing-rooms. His face, with its half-cynical, half-wearied expression, was, in its less individual characteristics, one of the typical faces of the society of the day. His voice and manner, well-bred, callous, and entirely unenthusiastic, were the voice and manner of that world where emotion is so entirely out of fashion that its existence as an ineradicable factor of healthy human nature is hardly acknowledged.

His presence and his cynical, cold-blooded talk seemed to do Mrs. Romayne good. Her face and manner hardened slightly, as though her nerves were braced, and something of the pinched, restless look of anxiety faded.

“It’s very nice of you to come and see us so soon!” she exclaimed with genuine satisfaction. “Town has really been abominably empty these last ten days. I suppose we came back rather too soon, but it seemed time that Julian should get to work. Really, I’ve hardly seen a soul.”

“It is a deadly time of year,” assented Loring, with a quick look at her, “but I’m grateful to it if it makes my presence welcome to you. Of course I called at once. I was rather afraid you might be still away.”

“We came back ten days ago,” answered Mrs. Romayne, accepting and putting aside his little compliment with a mocking gesture, as a form of words entirely conventional. “Julian has been quite lost without you. He is looking very well, I think, and is working amazingly.”

The introduction of Julian’s name into the conversation had in neither case come from Julian’s friend; but this time it appeared to strike Loring as incumbent upon him to pursue the topic.

“The approving words with which you received me were intended for him, I suppose,” he said carelessly. “You’re expecting him?”

There was a moment’s pause while Mrs. Romayne turned her head, as if involuntarily, and listened intently; that haunted look coming suddenly back into her eyes. The moment passed, and she turned to Loring again with a quick, self-conscious glance, and an unreal laugh.

“I’m expecting him; yes,” she said. “I’m ridiculous enough to make that very obvious, I’m afraid! I’m so glad he won’t miss you. He doesn’t generally come in at this hour. This is a treat—for me!”

She laughed, and Loring said with mock solemnity of interest:

“Indeed!”

“I really had to be quite plaintive this morning,” she went on in the same tone, “on the subject of not seeing him for four days except at breakfast! He has made a good many new acquaintances already, it seems, and has to dine out a good deal.”

“Really!” commented Loring. His tone was quite unmoved, and Mrs. Romayne did not see the expression in his shrewd, shallow eyes, as she spoke—an expression of amused curiosity. “He dines at his club, I suppose?” he enquired indifferently after a moment.

“Yes; or at some ‘other fellow’s’ club,” laughed his mother. “Legal institutions, I suppose!”

There was a brief silence; one of those silences which come when one branch of a conversation is felt to be exhausted; and then Loring finished his tea, put down his cup, and settled himself into a comfortable attitude.

“I forget whether you were taken with the Ibsen craze last season, Mrs. Romayne?” he said. “We shall all have to tie wet towels round our heads—it won’t be becoming, I’m afraid—and give ourselves up to solitary meditation, I hear! He is to be the thing this winter, they tell me.”

“Ibsen?” repeated Mrs. Romayne reflectively; obviously searching in her memory for some ideas to attach to the name, which she was as obviously conscious of having heard before. “Ibsen? Oh, yes,” with a sudden flash of inspiration, “oh, yes, of course; that ‘Dolls’ House’ man, that everybody talked of going to see just at the end of the season.”

The first of those startling pictures of human nastiness which have since exercised criticism to so great an extent, and which may or may not be revelations, had taken a wonderful hold upon a certain section of “society,” and had become, as Mrs. Romayne’s words implied, almost the fashion in the preceding June. Society is always inclined to be literary and intellectual, or rather, to an assumption of those qualities, in the winter. It was with a sense of the absolute duty of priming herself beforehand that Mrs. Romayne continued, with every appearance of the deepest interest:

“Ah, no! I’m sorry to say I was never able to spare an evening. Everybody told me all about it, though. It must have been awfully clever and interesting. But, you see, just at that time one has so much on hand! There was that dreadful bazaar, too. By-the-bye, have the Pomeroys come back yet, do you know, Mr. Loring?”

Mr. Loring believed that they had not, and after a little discussion of their probable plans, Mrs. Romayne returned to the subject of Ibsen.

“Are they going to bring out a new play of his, did you say?” she said carelessly.

“So I hear,” answered Loring. “An extraordinary piece of work, with a tremendous theory in it, of course. The idea is the influence of heredity.”

Mrs. Romayne started slightly. A strange flash leapt up in her eyes, and as it died out, quenched as it seemed by iron resolution, it left a curious expression on her face; it was an expression in which a light scorn—the normal attitude of the shallow, fashionable woman towards deep questions of any kind—seemed to be battling indomitably for a place against something which was hardly to be held at bay, by no means to be suppressed.

“Heredity!” she said; and the ring of her voice matched the expression of her face.

“It’s rather an interesting subject,” continued Loring indolently. Scientific questions in their social aspects were just becoming fashionable. “It’s wonderful how long we have stopped short at the inheritance of Roman noses, and violent tempers, and plain facts of that kind without getting to anything more subtle.”

“Yes; I suppose it is,” answered Mrs. Romayne. There was a hard restraint in her voice, which Loring took for preoccupation and laid to the account of her expectation of Julian. She was sitting with her back to the light, and he could not see the expression of her face.

“It’s awfully consoling, don’t you know,” he went on in the same tone, “to feel that one can lay all one’s little failings to the account of some dead and gone ancestor, with a scientific mind. I don’t notice, by-the-bye, that even the greatest and most enthusiastic scientists show any tendency to refer their virtues and talents back. I presume they are always self-developed.”

Mrs. Romayne laughed, as she was obviously intended to do; but her laugh was rather harsh.

“Do you know, I think scientific men are a dreadful race!” she said. “They think that they know so much better than everybody else, and that what they know is so immensely important. As a rule, you know, it’s about something that they really can’t know anything about, and if they could, it would be a great deal better not to bother about it.”

She spoke with a confident, conclusive superiority, which is only possible, perhaps, in that section of society to which knowledge and brain-power are among the minor and entirely unimportant factors of life—except when the knowledge is knowledge of the world, and the brain-power that which has adapted itself to the requirements of society. But the superiority in her tone rang strained and false. She seemed to be forcing the attitude on herself even more than on Loring; and there was a faint ring of defiance in her voice—utterly inconsistent and incompatible with the words she spoke. The combination was curiously suggestive of that consuming fear which denies the very existence of that by which it is created.

Loring, however, was too fully occupied with a cynical appreciation of the humorous aspect of the wholesale condemnation of learning by crass ignorance to detect anything beneath the surface. An enigmatical smile touched his lips.

“There’s a great deal of penetration in what you say,” he said. “Of course, there would be! But I think you’re a little sweeping, perhaps, when you say that they don’t really know anything. Take heredity, for instance; it’s an actual fact, capable of demonstration, that——”

But Loring’s eloquence was broken short off. At that moment the door opened, and Julian Romayne came into the room.

Mrs. Romayne started to her feet at the sight of him with a strange, hardly articulate sound, which was almost a gasp of relief, though it passed unnoticed by either of the two men, as Julian advanced quickly to Loring.

“How are you, old man?” he said pleasantly. “Awfully glad to see you back again.”

“This is the reward of merit, you see!” said Mrs. Romayne, as Loring replied, in the same tone. “You come home to tea with your mother, and you find a friend! Will you have some tea, sir?”

Her face was still a little odd, and unusual-looking, especially about the eyes; and the touch which she laid upon Julian, as if to enforce her words, was strangely clinging and nervous in its quick pressure.

The talk drifted in all sorts of directions after that; all more or less personal, either to the speakers, or to mutual acquaintances. As the moments passed, Loring’s eyes were fixed once or twice, with momentary intentness, on the younger man. That new touch of independence about Julian did not belong only to his manner with his mother. It was just perceptible towards the friend whom he had hitherto admired with boyish enthusiasm.

Loring rose to go at last, and as he did so he turned to Julian.

“If it were not that I don’t like to propose your deserting Mrs. Romayne,” he said, “I should ask you if you wouldn’t come and keep me company over a lonely dinner at the club, Julian? I suppose you don’t want to get rid of him, by any chance?” he continued, turning to Mrs. Romayne.

Mrs. Romayne and Julian laughed simultaneously; Julian with a little touch of embarrassment.

“I’m sure my mother has no objection to getting rid of me,” said Julian rather hastily; “but, unfortunately, I’m engaged.”

“Engaged!” said Loring. “Lucky fellow, to have engagements at this time of year!”

His tone was a little satirical, and Julian, who was following him out of the room, flushed slightly. His colour was still considerably deeper than usual when he dashed upstairs after seeing Loring out, and put his head in at the drawing-room door.

“I’m afraid I must be off directly, dear,” he said carelessly. “I was awfully sorry to get in so late, but Allardyce wanted me.”

An hour later, Julian was dining at a restaurant, dining simply, and dining alone. Having finished his dinner, and smoked a cigarette, glancing once or twice at his watch as he did so, he took his hat and coat and strolled out. It was nearly a quarter past eight, and the only light was, of course, the light of the street-lamps and the gas in the shop windows.

He passed along Piccadilly, not quickly, but with the deliberate intention of a man who has a definite destination, until he came to a certain side-street. Then he turned out of Piccadilly, and slackening his steps, sauntered slowly up on the right-hand pavement. He had walked up to the end of the street, casting sundry glances back over his shoulder as he did so, and was turning once more, as though to saunter down the street again, when the figure of a woman entered at the Piccadilly end. As soon as he saw her, Julian threw away his cigar, and quickening his steps, went to meet her.

The face she raised to his was the face of the girl on whose behalf he had interfered in Piccadilly ten days before, and her first words were uttered in the soft, musical voice that had thanked him then.

“Have you been waiting?” she said; “I’m sorry.”

The tone of the few words with which he answered, together with the expression with which he looked at her, showed as clearly as volumes of explanation could have done where and how the new Julian was being developed.

“Only a minute or two,” he said. “A lonely fellow like me doesn’t mind waiting a few minutes for the chance of a talk, as I’ve told you before.”

She looked up at him with simple, pitying eyes, and a certain wistfulness of expression, too.

“It seems so sad!” she said softly. “But you’ll make friends in London soon, I’m sure. Have you been working very hard to-day?”

“Have you been working very hard, is the more important question?” he said, turning his eyes away from those candid brown ones, with, to do him justice, a certain passing shame in his own. “I’m afraid there’s no need to ask that! You look awfully tired, Clemence!”

She shook her head with a pretty, brisk movement of reassurance.

“Oh, no!” she said, “it’s not been at all a hard day. It never seems hard, you know, when we don’t have to stay late, unless something goes wrong in the work-room; and I don’t think that happens very often.”

There was a simple, genuine content in the tone and manner in which the words were spoken, which, taken in conjunction with the colourlessness of the face, the tired look about the eyes, and the poor, worn dress, told a wonderful little story of patience and serenity of spirit.

All that Julian Romayne knew of Clemence Brymer—the brief and very simple outline of her life as she had told it to him—was comprised in a few by no means uncommon facts. She was a “hand” in one of the big millinery establishments, and had worked at the same place for the last two years. Before that time she had lived from her childhood first with a married brother, and then, when he died, with his widow and children. From a certain touch of reserve in her manner of speaking of those particular years, Julian had gathered that they had been hard ones. The marriage of the brother’s widow, and her departure to Australia, had left Clemence alone in London. Her parents, she told Julian, had come from Cambridgeshire; and one of her faint recollections of her father, who had died when she was only five years old, was of sitting on his knee in their little attic room in London, and being told by him about his country home. Her mother had died when she was a baby; and all her scanty recollections seemed to centre round the father, who, as she said simply, had been “a very good man.”

The simple trust and confidence in her face as she raised it to Julian now was a curious contrast to the nervous, half-frightened uncertainty of her glance at him on that night in the spring when they had shared for those two or three minutes the shelter of the same portico. But paradoxical as it seems at first, both expressions were the outcome, on different lines, of the same moral characteristic. Clemence, though there was that about her—as her face testified—which kept her, in all unconsciousness and innocence, strangely aloof and apart from her world, had not spent her life in London without learning to know its dangers. But the very purity which made the glances which she was forced to encounter in the streets at night a distress to her; which made the very proximity of an unknown “gentleman” an uneasiness to her; which made theoretical evil, in short, a terror to her; rendered her singularly incapable of recognising its existence on any but the baldest lines. Her confidence was quickly won because, though she was conscious of a world of evil about her, it was as a something large, and black, and obvious that she regarded it. Brought into contact with herself, anything fair-seeming was touched by the whiteness of her own temperament; and, with such unconscious extraneous aid, the thinnest veil was enough to hide from her anything behind. Her confidence once won, might be destroyed, but could hardly be shaken. Something in Julian’s face and manner had won it for him, and the outline of his circumstances which he had given her had won him something else—her pity.

Exactly by what motive he had been actuated in his statements to her, Julian would have found it rather hard to say; as a matter of fact he never asked himself the question. Before the end of their first walk together he had presented himself to her as a medical student living entirely alone in London, having no female friends, or even acquaintances, and wearying often of the rough masculine companionship of his fellows. On these grounds he had asked her when they parted at the end of a little poverty-stricken street near the farther end of the Hammersmith Road, whether he might meet her now and again and walk home with her. She had hesitated for an instant, and then had assented, very simply.

“You haven’t had to work late for four nights now,” she said, as they turned their backs upon Piccadilly and began to walk steadily in the opposite direction. “Shall you have to to-morrow night, do you think?”

She lifted her eyes to his face as she spoke, and as he looked down and met them it would have been clear to an onlooker what was the charm that those long evening walks possessed for Julian. In the girl’s clear eyes there was admiration and absolute reliance. In the look with which he answered them there was conscious superiority and protection.

Just at the moment when he was sore and smarting with a sense of humiliation and futility; when in his newly-aroused angry discontent all intercourse with women of his own class had become a farce and an inanity to him; accident had thrown it into his power to create for himself, as it were, a world in which all that had suddenly revealed itself as lacking in his actual life should be lavished upon him. For his acquaintance of Piccadilly he had absolutely no surroundings, except such as he chose to give himself. The Julian Romayne of society, the nonentity, the “figure-head,” as he had muttered angrily to himself, had no existence for her. It was Julian’s own private Julian, a personality developed side by side with the sudden and violent re-adjustment of his conception of his relations with the world, who was looked up to, listened to, respected, and deferred to during the hour’s walk which lay between that side-street out of Piccadilly and a certain little street out of the Hammersmith Road. A vague, undefined craving for pre-eminence and admiration had risen in him with his realisation of his dependence, and the reflected nature of the light with which he shone in society. To a weak nature in which that craving has once stirred it matters little by what means it is met, so that it is to some extent satisfied.

The walk of to-night was a repetition of the walks that had preceded it; the talk a little more intimate and a little more personal in tone than any of its predecessors, as that of each of the latter in its turn had been.

In the course of the day something had occurred to remind Clemence of her father and her father’s old home, and in intervals of Julian’s talk about himself, she told him a good deal about her thoughts of that little country place; of how there had been Brymers here for generations and generations.

“You must have been Puritans once,” said Julian, laughing, as he often laughed, at some little grave turn of her speech as he looked into the sweet, serious face. Work-girl as she was, she seemed to have acquired neither the talk nor the voice of her kind. The simple form of her words, her accent, and her gentle voice, seemed to belong to a past, quiet and full of a modest dignity of which the London of the nineteenth century hardly knows. “You would have made an awfully jolly little Puritan, Clemence!”

“I don’t know,” she said simply; “I was so little when father died. But he felt it dreadfully, I’ve heard, when he came to London; it nearly broke his heart.”

“Why did he do it, then?” said Julian lightly.

“He thought he ought,” returned the girl. “You see, there was nothing to do at Feldbourne—nothing but ploughing, and country things, you know. And father thought a man ought to do something—that everything was meant to go on and get better, you know—and that every man ought to help, ought to work. So, of course, he was obliged to come, you see.”

They had come to the end of the road now, where they always said good night, and as she spoke she was standing still, looking simply into his face. He looked at her for a moment with something in his eyes which seemed to be struggling vaguely into life side by side with the careless mockery of his “set.”

“He was obliged to come, because he thought he ought,” he said. “Do you always do what you think you ought, Clemence?”

“I try,” she said simply. “Every one tries, I suppose.”

He laughed—the laugh that was so like his mother’s—but not quite so freely as usual, and held out his hand.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Good night, Clemence.”

“Good night,” she said.

He hesitated a moment. He never went to meet her without a firm and definite intention of sealing their parting with a kiss. But he had never done so yet, and he did not do it now.

“Good night,” he said again, rather lamely; and then they parted, she going quickly and quietly down the street, he passing out of it into the noise and bustle of the Hammersmith Road.

Once there, he paused as though undecided.

“It’s too early to go home,” he said to himself. “I’ll go down to the club for a bit.”

There were a good many men in the club-room when he entered it half an hour later—and Julian—quite another young man to the Julian who had walked to the Hammersmith Road—was discussing the latest society topic with much animation over a whisky and seltzer, when Loring, to whom he had nodded at the other end of the room, strolled up to him, cigar in hand.

“Dinner been a failure?” he enquired.

There was nothing particular about the words; and the tone in which they were uttered was singularly, almost significantly, devoid of expression. But there was a keen, satirical expression in his eyes as he fixed them on Julian.

Julian started slightly at the words, and a curious flash of expression passed across his face.

“More or less,” he said, with a careless frankness that seemed just a trifle excessive.

“Who was the man?”

“I don’t think you know him,” said Julian, his carelessness bordering on defiance.

Loring smiled. His smile was never particularly pleasant, and at this moment it was unusually cynical.

“I know a good many men, too,” he observed.