Ten minutes after Mrs. Romayne’s departure Julian was standing before Mrs. Pomeroy, his whole demeanour typical of the man who lingers, knowing that he should linger no longer. “What a nuisance appointments are!” he said, with a boyish frankness of discontent which was irresistible. “I wish I could stay a little longer, but I know I oughtn’t.” He laughed quite ruefully, and fixed a pair of ardent eyes on Miss Pomeroy’s demurely averted face. “It’s been such an awfully jolly affair, hasn’t it? And it’s so awfully jolly to have you in town again”—this, with delightful deference, to Mrs. Pomeroy. “Well, I really must go, you know! Good-bye! Perhaps you won’t be staying very much longer?” “If you stay here bemoaning yourself very much longer we shall probably leave before you do!” suggested Miss Pomeroy, with the rather faint smile which was the only sign of amusement she ever gave, and which always accompanied her own mild witticisms. Julian turned to her eagerly. “Now, that’s awfully unkind!” he said. “You won’t bully me like that in Queen Anne Street, will you?” The term “bullying” was so profoundly inapplicable to Miss Pomeroy’s words that its use suggested a certain amount of arrangement rather than absolute spontaneity about Julian’s speech. But exaggeration was the fashion, and not to be commented on. “Come in a very kind frame of mind, won’t you?” he went on pleadingly. “Am I a very violent person?” the girl answered, with the same smile. “Good-bye!” She held out her hand as she spoke, and Julian took it with laughing reluctance. “You are an absolutely heartless person,” he said daringly, “to dismiss me like this! However, I suppose you are right. If you “You’ve told us that before; now do it!” was the answer. “Good-bye!” “Good-bye!” returned Julian, with mock meekness. He shook hands again, which seemed hardly necessary, and then he turned away. But the necessity which enforced his departure had apparently slackened its pressure on him by the time he actually left the house. As he walked away down the street there was no sign about him of that haste which should characterise a man who has lingered to the risking of an appointment, or who has, indeed, any engagement in immediate prospect. The bride and bridegroom had already left, and people were beginning to go, and until he reached the end of the street in which was Mrs. Halse’s house, he was passed every instant by carriages to whose occupants his hat had to be smilingly lifted. Then he turned into a main thoroughfare, and hailed a hansom—still not in the least like a man in a hurry. He gave the cabman an address in the Temple, and was driven away. His face as he went would have been a curious study to any onlooker possessed of the key to its expression; to any onlooker who could have detected the constant struggle for dominance between something that seemed to lie behind its new artificiality and that artificiality itself, evidently maintained under an instinctive sense of the chances of observation. It was not until he turned his key in the lock of a set of chambers in the Temple that the boyish vivacity died wholly out of his face; he went into his room—he shared the chambers with another embryo barrister—shutting the door behind him; and as he did so he seemed to have shut in, not the light-hearted young fellow who had paid the cabman in the street below, but another man altogether. No one looking at him now could doubt that this was the real Julian Romayne of to-day, as certainly as that light-hearted young fellow had been the real Julian Romayne of a year ago. This was a man with a hard, angry face; a face on which the anger stood revealed, not as the expression of the moment, but as the normal expression of The room was plainly, almost barely furnished, and there was no trace of any of the luxury that surrounded him in Queen Anne Street. His smart, carefully got-up figure looked absolutely incongruous among such unusual surroundings, as he crossed to the window, and flinging himself down in a shabby easy-chair, lighted a cigarette. He threw his cigarette-case on the table, and then drew out of the breast-pocket of his coat a couple of letters. He had read them before, evidently, but as evidently they had lost none of their interest for him. He read them both through attentively, and as he did so there came to his mouth a set which his mother, could she have seen it, would have recognised instantly; which any one, indeed, must have recognised who had ever seen his dead father. Both the letters dealt with money matters; one was from a bookmaker, the other from a broker whose name was far from bearing an unblemished character in the City; and both referred to large sums of money recently made He flung the last on the table as he finished it, and there was an expression in his eyes of reckless, rebellious triumph not good to see. “It’s a good haul!” he said, half aloud. “A good haul! Now, with what I’ve got already——” He rose and went across to the writing-table, unlocked a drawer, and taking out various papers, began to make rapid calculations. Then—his eyes hard and intent on his work—he stretched out his hand and felt in the drawer for another paper. He took out an envelope, and drew out the letter it contained without glancing at it. A folded paper fell out as he did so, and as though the slight sound had roused him, he glanced at it quickly, and from it to the open letter in his hand. Apparently it was not the letter to which he had intended to refer, for his face changed suddenly and completely. “I can’t take your money. Try and understand that I can’t!—Clemence.” His fingers tightened upon the thin sheet It was to that which was least broadly painted on his face that all these passionate forces owed their life. As with a wild animal wounded by a dart, and feeling that dart—lodged in his side—pricking and piercing him, who plunges wildly hither and thither, chafing and striving in blind, brute fashion to rid himself of the sensation he cannot understand; and in his very efforts presses in the cause of his pain, increases his sufferings, To charge upon some one else the difficulties which he had created for himself, to But there were in Julian Romayne tendencies, latent, or nearly so, throughout his youth and early manhood; manifested during those easy, untempted periods only in a slight superficiality, a slight want of perception as to the boundary line between truth and falsehood; but radical factors in his being. In the shock and jar of the mental struggle and Throughout his boyhood, easy as it had been, untouched by any strong passion or desire, he had lied now and again, naturally and instinctively. He had lied to save himself trouble, to save himself some slight reproach—as he had lied to his mother on the subject of his visit to Alexandria, to save himself from the confession of having forgotten her commission. He had lied to Clemence from first to last, and the first prick of that dart, which was now his constant companion, had touched him when he first felt shame for those lies. But there was a reckless, calculating deception about his life In that desperate craving for money, in which all the passion of his life was centering itself, dishonesty of deed was the natural and inevitable corollary of dishonesty of word. The possession of money was his one object in life; his conscience as to the means by which that money was to be obtained he deliberately put into abeyance for the time being. He had become possessed in the course of the last six months of some thousands, not one of which had been earned by honest work; much of which had come to him by more than questionable means. That two-edged dart must have been finely tempered that it never seemed to blunt! The dormant life in that higher part of him, to which it had penetrated, must have been life indeed, that it should throb and quiver stronger and stronger, side by side with all that was lowest and worst in him, making the struggle grow always fiercer, and goading him on and on. The dart owed its edge, the life its growing He crushed the sheet of common note-paper almost fiercely in his hand now, and thrust it away to the back of the drawer from which it had come. He caught up the paper which had fallen from it—the cheque he had sent her three days before—and tore it savagely into fragments. Then he swept the papers on which he had been busy unheedingly into a drawer, locked it sharply, and rose, white to the very lips. “It can’t be long now,” he muttered. “It shan’t be! Men make their piles in a day—in an hour; why should not I? It shan’t be long!” He stood for a moment, his hand clenched, his features compressed, his eyes full of a sullen fire. Then he turned sharply away and left the room. There was no trace of any fire about him, however, except the harmless irradiation of youth and good spirits, when he opened the door of his mother’s drawing-room a few minutes before their dinner-hour. He had |