There had been a slight, sudden movement as Julian opened the door, as though Mrs. Romayne had changed her attitude quickly. She was leaning forward now, looking at an illustrated paper, but the cushions behind her were tumbled and crushed, as if she had been leaning back on them, and leaning heavily. She was wearing a tea-gown, and she seemed to keep her face rather carefully in shadow.

“Rather an amusing party, wasn’t it?” she said lightly, looking up as he came in. “Everybody goes to that woman’s. I can’t imagine why. Well, and is there any news, sir?”

“I’m afraid not,” returned Julian gaily. “I’ve spent an hour at the club to try and pick up some crumbs for you, but there was nothing going.”

The manner of each to the other was precisely the same, now that they were alone together, as it had been when they addressed one another incidentally in the course of general conversation. The very familiarity between them had a flavour of artificiality about it, and that flavour was mainly given, strangely enough, by Mrs. Romayne rather than by Julian. It was her manner, not his, that lacked ease and overdid the spontaneity. They chatted brightly about men and things, but she never asked him a single personal question, though at any incidental allusion let fall by him as to his doings a faint contraction of the muscles about her eyes gave her a hungry, concentrated look, as of a creature catching at a crumb. It seemed to be in a great measure that tendency to keen intentness of expression which had so greatly altered her face.

“You see I’ve been lazy!” she said lightly, indicating her dress with a slight gesture as they sat down to dinner. They were going out in the evening, and she usually dressed before dinner on such occasions. “I really couldn’t be bothered to dress before!”

The lamplight was full on her face now, and Julian, his attention drawn to her by the words, saw that she looked frightfully haggard and worn under her paint and her little air of gaiety. Paint had ceased to be an appendage of full dress with her since her three days’ illness. The combination added a touch of repulsion to his feeling towards her. But his tone as he answered her was the tone of affectionate concern, over-elaborated by the merest shade only.

“You’ve not over-tired yourself, I hope, dear?” he said. “I don’t believe you ought to go out again to-night, do you know!”

Mrs. Romayne’s thin fingers were tearing fiercely at the pocket-handkerchief in her lap as he spoke, and her eyes were bright with pain. It seemed as though her ears had caught that subtle shade of over-elaboration, though they must have been quick indeed to do so. But she answered, almost before he had finished speaking, in a rather high-pitched tone of eager determination.

“Silliest of boys,” she said; “the topic is threadbare. I am quite well! Oh, it is very evident that my retiring to bed for a day or two is an unparalleled event, or you would not be quite so slow in grasping the fact that it is possible to recover after such a terrific crisis! Now, do promise not to talk any more about what you don’t in the least understand!”

The merriment of her tone was fictitious, even to Julian’s unheeding ear, but he took it up with a mental shrug of his shoulders. It was not his fault, he told himself, if she would overdo herself for the sake of a little excitement.

He told himself the same thing, carelessly enough, when he put her into her carriage two or three hours later. It was early; Mrs. Romayne had declared the party to be insufferably dull and had stayed only half an hour, during which time she had been as vivacious and attractive as usual. But towards the end her eyes had become feverishly bright, and Julian, as he took her out, could feel that she was trembling from head to foot.

“Are you coming home?” she said to him.

“Well, if you don’t mind, dear, I was thinking of going to look up Loring at the club.”

A breath of relief parted Mrs. Romayne’s lips, and she answered hastily. Apparently she had no desire for her son’s company on her way home.

“Go, by all means!” she said. “Of course I don’t mind!”

She pulled up the window almost abruptly, nodding to him with a smile, the singular ghastliness of which was, presumably, referable to some effect of gaslight. Then as the carriage rolled away she sank back and let her face relax into an expression of utter weariness, with a little gasping catch of her breath as of deadly physical exhaustion.

His words about Loring had been a mere figure of speech on Julian’s part, but he did intend to go to the club, and he carried his intention into effect. He glanced round the smoking-room as he went in to see if Loring was there, but the fact that he was not visible in no way affected his serenity. He was so altered from the boy of a twelvemonth before, and his intercourse with Loring had been so completely suspended during the period of his developement, that their friendship seemed now to belong to some previous phase of his existence; it was his sense that he had passed utterly out of touch with the man with whom he had once been intimate, together with a conviction that Loring’s keen perceptions would be by no means a desirable factor in his surroundings at the moment, that had dictated his demonstration of delight at Loring’s reappearance. An outward show of enthusiasm was a very effective blind, in his opinion.

His manner was regulated on the same principle on Loring’s appearance in the smoking-room about half an hour later. He was on his way to the card-room, and he was anything but pleased at the frustration of his plans in that direction; but his reception of Loring indicated, rather, that he had spent the last half-hour in watching for him.

“Here you are at last, old man!” he cried. “I thought you’d turn up some time or other! What became of you this afternoon? I never saw you after you disappeared with my mother.”

The two men had met close to the door, and they were still standing, Loring, as blasÉ and imperturbable-looking as usual, with his observant eyes on Julian’s face.

“I didn’t care to spoil sport!” he returned with a significant smile. “You seemed to be particularly well employed!”

Julian laughed—the conscious, not ill-pleased laugh which belonged to his part. Such contingencies were all incidental to the situation.

“Oh, come, old boy,” he said deprecatingly. Then he laughed again, and added: “I suppose my mother said something to you?”

“No!” returned Loring quietly. “I happen to have eyes, you see!”

“Don’t make magnifying glasses of them, then!” was the laughing retort. “Now then, there are several fellows here who have been asking for you.”

But as Julian glanced round he became aware that the room chanced to be almost empty. Loring understood at the same time that he had wished to make the conversation general and impersonal, and a slight smile touched his lips.

Marston Loring had various reasons of his own for not intending to allow himself to be eluded by Julian Romayne. The change in the young man alone would have excited his curiosity; and sundry details which had already come to his knowledge, notably one across which he had stumbled in the City that morning, had quickened that curiosity. His suspicions of the preceding autumn, that there was something behind Julian’s life as it appeared on the surface, were by no means forgotten by him. His departure for Africa had taken him out of the way of the crisis, but he more than half suspected that a crisis there had been. The connection between the present and the past, and the means by which it could be most advantageously applied to the furtherance of his own ends, were the problems he had set himself to solve.

“We’re rather in luck!” he said. “We can have a quiet chat together.”

He established himself lazily and comfortably as he spoke, as Julian with much apparent satisfaction flung himself into another chair, and took out his cigar-case.

Julian’s questions followed one another thick and fast. His interest in his friend’s life during the last six months seemed to be inexhaustible in its intelligence and sympathy. He had a great deal to tell, too; and he told it so fluently and gaily as almost to disguise the fact that the allusions to his own doings were of the most superficial type. But at last there was a pause. Julian was pulling out his watch, and saying something about going home, when Loring lighted a fresh cigar and opened the proceedings—as he conceived them.

“I heard of you in the City this morning!” he said nonchalantly.

There was no pause in the movement with which Julian returned his watch to his pocket; nothing, absolutely, to betray the fact that the words were a surprise to him. Yet they were a surprise, and an exceedingly unpleasant one. His transactions in the City he had arranged to keep secret; that their nature should become known was eminently undesirable, and he had decided that the fact itself would be inconsistent with his pose before the world. That Loring should be the man to unearth them was exceptionally unfortunate.

“Did you?” he said lightly; “and who was saying what of me in the City—a vague locality, by-the-bye.”

“The introduction of your name was accidental—accidents will happen, you know, even in Adams’s office. Is that a definite locality enough to please you?”

Julian burst into a boyish laugh and flung himself back in his chair; he carried his cigar to his lips as he did so, not noticing apparently that it had gone out. Loring noticed it, however.

“What a fellow you are, Loring!” he cried. “You’ve not been in England three days before you unearth a poor chap’s most private little games! I say, you’ll keep it dark, won’t you? I wouldn’t have it come round to my mother, you know! She’s so awfully generous to me, and it might hurt her feelings.”

There was an ingenuous frankness and confidence in his voice which gave to the whole affair the aspect of a youthful escapade. Loring smiled as he answered:

“I wouldn’t have a hand in hurting Mrs. Romayne’s feelings for the world.” He paused a moment, and then added carelessly, as if the whole transaction was the merest matter of course: “Been doing much?”

Julian shook his head.

“No, of course not,” he said lightly. “Only a little occasional lark, don’t you know. I leave the big things to clever fellows like you. By-the-bye, Loring, I’d no idea you did anything in that way.”

Loring puffed slowly at his cigar before he answered.

“I’m an old hand,” he said nonchalantly. “I wait for certainties, my boy!” He paused again. “To tell you the truth,” he said slowly, fastening a keen, cleverly-veiled gaze on Julian’s face, “I did not ask the question altogether idly. It occurred to me that if you had made anything worth mentioning you might be on the look-out for a means of—well, we’ll put it mildly and say—increasing it.”

There was considerable meaning in Loring’s voice, careless as it was. Julian became very still, and into his eyes there crept an eager, hungry light which harmonised ill with the fixed nonchalance of the rest of his features as he answered with a laugh:

“I don’t know the fellow who could refuse to admit that soft impeachment! We’re all in the same boat as far as that goes, I take it. You haven’t got a good thing up your sleeve, old man, have you?”

Loring smiled ambiguously.

“Most ‘good things’ would come to an untimely end if every one with a finger in them spread them abroad, my boy!” he observed. “Since it can’t concern you personally—if you’ve no capital—we’ll say no more about it.”

A certain amount of Loring’s practice dealt with financial affairs; he was no mean authority on City matters, and there was something about his manner indescribably provocative. Julian leaned forward with a movement of irrepressible eagerness.

“Is it really a good thing?” he said. He spoke with a quick, low-toned directness which put aside the fencing of the previous dialogue, and replied not to what Loring had said, but to what he had implied. Loring looked him full in the face and answered laconically and significantly:

“Rather!”

The hungry light was burning fiercely in Julian’s eyes, and he turned his face away from Loring and began to fidget with an ash-tray lying on the table by him.

“Capital?” he said. “What do you call capital, now?”

“Oh, anything between ten thousand and five-and-twenty thousand,” said Loring carelessly.

There was a silence. Julian’s brain was working feverishly, and Loring was well content to let it work. At last Julian began to speak in a low, rapid tone, with the air of one who has made up his mind to frank confidence. He had intended to keep Loring at arm’s length; he had decided now to play a bolder game, and use him.

“Look here, Loring,” he said, “I may as well make a clean breast of it! I have gone a bit farther than I said. You see, as I told you, my mother’s most awfully generous, and I wouldn’t let a hint of this get to her for the world; but a man doesn’t like to feel that he’s dependent on his mother for everything, don’t you know—especially if he’s thinking of marrying. You know what it is when one once begins to feel the money come in! I’ve gone on, you see—as lots of fellows do—and I’ve got a tidy little pile. Of course I’m very keen on making it more before—well, before I propose, don’t you know! And if you can give me a lift up I shall be eternally obliged.”

He stopped, and Loring smoked for a minute or two in silence. At last he said slowly:

“I understand! It’s natural, of course. Well, I don’t stand alone in the affair, to tell you the truth. There’s another man to be consulted. But I’ll talk the matter over with him, and if I can manage to get you in you may be sure I will. You shall have a line in a day or two, or I’ll see you again.” Loring dropped the end of his cigar into the ash-tray and rose.