More than one of the people who had talked to Mrs. Romayne in the interval had been vaguely aware of a certain incontrollable preoccupation behind her manner; though the intense, suppressed excitement in which that preoccupation originated passed undetected. Her restless eyes fastened upon Miss Pomeroy and Julian on the very instant of their reappearance in the room, and as they came towards her that excitement leapt up suddenly and lit up her whole face with a wild flash of hope and anticipation. They drew nearer and it died down again even more suddenly than it had sprung up; and in its passing it seemed to have aged her face curiously, and to have left upon it a stamp of heart-sick disappointment, touched with a creeping anxiety. Miss Pomeroy was pale, and her usual still placidity seemed to be accentuated into absolute stupidity. Julian’s face was quite colourless, and beneath the travesty of his usual manner which he assumed in speaking to his mother, there was an indefinable expression which made him look ten years older and twenty years harder and more bitter.

Scruples on his part as to crushing their dress prevented his going home with them. He would follow in a hansom, he said. But before he arrived Miss Pomeroy had said good night to Mrs. Romayne with a neatly-turned and quite meaningless expression of the pleasure the evening had given her, and had retired to her room. Mrs. Romayne, looking haggard and worn, lingered until Julian came in, and went out to meet him.

“Good night, mother,” he said, and went straight upstairs without pausing.

It was many, many years since he had left her at night without a kiss; and as Mrs. Romayne went slowly up to her room through the silent house, she stumbled once or twice as though her wide, dry eyes hardly saw the stairs before her.

That creeping anxiety had gained ground greatly in her face the next morning when she came down at about half-past ten, to learn from the servant that “Mr. Julian” had already breakfasted and had gone to the Temple. Even more pathetic than the anxiety itself was the courage that battled against it; that strove so hard to become confidence as she led—and, indeed, sustained—the conversation, as she and Miss Pomeroy, who was late in putting in an appearance, breakfasted together. She talked lightly and gaily of Julian’s defection on this, their visitor’s last morning; she deplored the fact that it was indeed the last morning, talking of various half-formed schemes for such constant meetings as would be practically a continuance of the intimate association of the past fortnight. But of response she obtained little or none. An access of conventionality, demureness, and insipidity seemed to be inspiring Miss Pomeroy; an access characterised by a certain absolute obstinacy of colourlessness. She had no opinions, no sentiments of any sort or kind to offer; her expressions of regret at leaving were as unmeaning as they were correct. Mrs. Romayne’s plans seemed to wither under her little non-committal smile and comment; and she took her irreproachable leave an hour later with a vaguely expressed hope that they might meet “somewhere,” and apparently without hearing Mrs. Romayne’s parting allusion to Julian.

Each one of the days that followed seemed to leave upon Mrs. Romayne’s face some such effect as might have been produced upon a marble counterpart of that face by the delicate application of a sharp modelling tool. Every feature became a little sharper; every line a little deeper, a little harder. Nobody noticed the fact, and nobody could have traced it to its source had they done so. But there were times when she was alone; times when that chisel under which she grew more haggard every day revealed itself as heart-sick, gnawing anxiety.

For three or four days Miss Pomeroy’s hope that they might meet “somewhere” remained unfulfilled; and Mrs. Romayne made little jokes at what she assumed to be Julian’s disconsolate condition; jokes which, taken in conjunction with the look in her eyes as she spoke them, were almost ghastly. Then the meeting took place at a party from which, as it appeared, Miss Pomeroy and her mother were just departing; so that a few words of greeting on either side was all that passed.

Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter called on Mrs. Romayne a day or two later. It was Mrs. Romayne’s “day,” of course; the room was very full, and as Mrs. Pomeroy said, with an expression as near apprehension as was compatible with her placidity in the eyes which kept turning to her daughter’s demure face: “Wednesday is such a popular day, and we’ve really dozens of calls to pay, haven’t we, Maud?” Consequently they stayed barely ten minutes, and exchanged half-a-dozen sentences with their hostess. But short and formal as the call was, it was supplemented by no more intimate intercourse. They met, of course, nearly every day. That is to say, Mrs. Romayne, as she went about indefatigably from party to party, caught constant glimpses of Miss Pomeroy and her mother just arriving as she left, just leaving as she arrived, just going to supper, to tea, to fulfil some social duty or other which made it impossible that more than a word or two should pass. When Mrs. Romayne pressed Miss Pomeroy, with sprightly reproaches, to come and see her, she was met invariably with unmeaning smiles, and vague words about engagements, which, gentle as they sounded, proved as little capable of manipulation as a stone. Once or twice after such a meeting, Mrs. Romayne’s jokes at Julian’s expense, as she told him of them airily afterwards—Julian and Miss Pomeroy never seemed to meet now—took the form of hints and innuendoes as to whether he was not at the bottom of “the mystery,” as she called it; and whether he could not perhaps sweep it away. There was a terrible contrast between the casual gaiety with which such hints were dropped by her, and the something which lay behind; something which gave her voice a strange, unnatural ring, and cut her words off almost before they had any meaning; something the name of which, as it lurked in the hard, bright eyes which never met Julian’s, was nervous fear.

Such hints were always met and turned by Julian as lightly as they were uttered.

Before a fortnight had passed since Miss Pomeroy’s departure, Mrs. Romayne had acquired a habit of giving one quick, almost furtive, glance round any room she entered in which people were assembled, and that look was particularly eager and intent as she entered a drawing-room to fulfil an engagement for a luncheon-party one day at the beginning of the third week. A luncheon is by no means a bad opportunity for a “quiet chat.” She did not see the figures she was in search of, though no one could have detected that fact from her expression. Nor could any one have interpreted the sudden exclamation of surprise she uttered.

“Why, it’s Dennis Falconer!” she said prettily. “I had no idea you were in town.”

It was Dennis Falconer; not a little altered by the past eight months, and altered for the better. Six months earlier he had disappeared from the ken of his society acquaintances; disappeared quietly, almost imperceptibly. By-and-by, when his absence began to be commented upon, rumour had whispered it abroad that he was “laid up or something.” The fact, so lightly stated and equally lightly commented on, had meant for Falconer a realisation of the possibilities hinted at by his doctor early in November. He had passed from the dreariness of unoccupied and somewhat lonely club life into the infinitely heavier dreariness of a solitary sick-room.

Within his own limits and on his own lines Dennis Falconer was a strong man. With his dark hour absolutely upon him he braced himself to meet it with stern dignity; and he endured four months of physical suffering and mental tedium—from which that suffering, weary and unremitting as it was, was seldom acute enough to relieve him—with uncomplaining fortitude. He was quite alone. Circumstances had occurred to detain Dr. Aston in India, and his solitude was not realised by any of his club acquaintances. It was a period on which, in after life, he never willingly looked back; a dark hour, in truth. But it was lived through at last, and as it passed away it gave place to a clear and steady light, in which the shadows which had preceded it had vanished. Severe as had been the means, the end was amply attained. He emerged from his sick-room in such perfect physical health as he had not known for years. All the disabilities under which he had laboured during the preceding summer were removed, and in every nerve and muscle he was conscious of vigorous life. In May he had received his doctor’s permission to return to his work, and he was in London now to arrange the preliminaries of an expedition with which he hoped to leave England early in the autumn.

The physical change in him was conspicuous as he stepped forward to return Mrs. Romayne’s greeting. He looked ten years younger than he had been wont to look; the worn look of endurance had gone, and there was an air of strength and power about him which was very noticeable. Hardly less striking was the change in his expression. Much of the grim austerity of his demeanour during the previous summer had originated in the painful depression consequent on his state of health; much also in his realisation of his position as a man laid aside and solacing himself as best he might. The gravity and reserve of his expression remained, but the heaviness had disappeared completely.

His manner to Mrs. Romayne, as he shook the hand she held out to him, was significant of the lighter and more tolerant point of view from which his own lighter prospects unconsciously led him to contemplate his fellow-creatures. It was neither expansive nor friendly, but it lacked that undercurrent of stiff condemnation which had previously characterised it.

“I have intended to call on you,” he said with grave directness. “I am sorry to appear negligent. But my time is no longer at my own disposal.”

Mrs. Romayne put aside the claim on his time which he imputed to her with a quick gesture and a laugh.

“You are quite recovered, I hope?” she said easily. “Tiresome business, convalescence, isn’t it?”

“I am quite recovered, I am thankful to say,” responded Falconer; he was so keenly conscious of all that the words meant for him that he was insensible even to the jarring effect her manner had always had for him. “I hope before very long to be at work again. Indeed, I am practically at work now.”

“Yes?” said Mrs. Romayne prettily. “Are you thinking of going abroad again?”

“I am going out to Africa. I shall hardly be in England again for another five years.”

Mrs. Romayne had been looking vaguely about the room, evidently bestowing a modicum of her attention only on Falconer. But as he spoke the last words the slightest possible start passed through her frame and her wandering eyes suddenly ceased to wander. There was a moment’s pause, and then she turned them on Falconer’s face.

“Really? And when do you go?”

There was something rather odd beneath the carelessness of her voice, and her eyes, as she fixed them on Falconer’s, were odd too.

“I hope to leave England early in October.”

Mrs. Romayne made no reply. Her face suggested curiously that the actual exigencies of the situation had faded for her, that she was not in the present at all. For the moment there was no trace of that satisfaction and relief which would have been the natural consummation, on such news, of the defiance and distaste so hardly repressed in her manner to her “connexion” during the past year. She looked, apparently unconsciously, into the grave, steady man’s face above her, and there was a vague, half-formed expression in her eyes, which might have been a suddenly-stirred sense of loneliness or foreboding.

It was gone again in an instant. And as the man who was to take her in to lunch approached her, she turned from Falconer with the lightest possible “au revoir.”

Falconer found himself very well situated at luncheon. A question came up on which his word carried weight, and the discussion which ensued brought home to him that sense of renewed power and standing in the world so grateful to him after his long period of inaction. He was full of grave content and satisfaction, when, after lunch, circumstances threw him again with Mrs. Romayne; and his whole mental attitude was suffused with a dignified kindliness. He began to speak at once with grave, but not unfriendly interest, and as though he were conscious of a certain remissness.

“I am glad to hear of your son! I hope it is quite satisfactory to you?”

Mrs. Romayne had acknowledged his vicinity with a conventional word and smile. Circumstances demanded of her at the moment no active exertion; she was standing aside, as it were, for the instant, and there were tired lines faintly visible about her mouth. They disappeared, however, as if by magic, beneath the hard intentness which leapt into her face as she turned sharply to Falconer on his first words. The movement was apparently involuntary, for she turned away, lifting with elaborate carelessness the long eye-glasses which she had lately adopted, as though to cover the first movement, and said, as she looked through them at something at the other end of the room:

“It’s very stupid of me, no doubt, but I must ask you to explain!”

The neutrality of her previous conversation with him had vanished as completely as the strange suggestion with which it had ended had vanished. The old defiance, apparently entirely uncalled-for, rang in her elaborately indifferent voice.

“Is it so old a story?” said Falconer. “Or is it, perhaps, a mistake?” he added with genuine regret. “I hope not. A sensible marriage is such a safeguard—a covenant with society. I heard of your son’s engagement some three weeks ago on what purported to be excellent authority.”

“Did you hear the name of the young lady by any chance?”

Mrs. Romayne achieved a harsh little laugh as she spoke.

Falconer glanced round the room and lowered his voice.

“Miss Maud Pomeroy!” he said. “A most desirable wife for him, I should have said!”

Eight months before, under the inexplicable influence of the face and manner of the pale, dignified woman who had faced him so bravely in the little lodging in Camden Town, Dennis Falconer had been almost ready to urge upon Julian Romayne marriage with the girl he was supposed to have ruined. But he would have done so convinced, in the recesses of his heart to which that woman’s influence could not penetrate, that such a course must mean ruin to the young man; and in the grim severity of his mental attitude at the time, he would have said that such ruin was the just and righteous consequence of the young man’s guilt. Clemence’s disappearance had frustrated the possibility of any such action on his part; time and the pressing actualities of his own life had obliterated the impression made on him; and the whole affair had gradually faded into the past. Insensibly to himself he looked upon it now, conventionally enough, as one of those dark episodes which are in no way to be obliterated or lightened, but which may and must be overlaid. To that end it seemed to him, in the relaxation of his sterner attitude, a thing so natural as to be necessarily condoned that Julian should marry in his own class and settle down.

A moment’s pause followed on his words. Mrs. Romayne was sweeping the room with her eye-glasses. The hand which held them shook a little, and, if the man beside her could have known it, she saw absolutely nothing.

“Maud Pomeroy!” she said at last, and she seemed to be unconscious of that moment’s interval of silence. “Ah! Well, to tell you the truth, that is not such an extraordinary report, though it hardly represents the fact—at present. Young people will be young people, you know, and they must be allowed their little wilfulnesses!”

She also had lowered her voice, though it was high-pitched, and her speech was almost exaggeratedly confidential. Influenced by the tone into which they had thus fallen, Falconer said, meaningly and not unkindly:

“You have had to make no more serious allowances, I hope—since?”

With a laugh so light and high as to be painfully out of tune, Mrs. Romayne answered him gaily in the negative. One little peccadillo, she said, was not such a very terrible thing in a young man’s record, and she was charmed to say that with that little affair of which they both knew her anxieties on Julian’s account had begun and ended. She held out her hand to Falconer as she finished her assurance, parting with him with her brightest air of society friendliness, and as he wished her good-bye, looking down into the trivial vivacity of her face, Falconer felt himself stirred for the first time by a certain touch of pity for her. Coming upon his softer mood and the comparatively friendly nature of their talk, the eager assurance with which she spoke struck him as being not without pathos. He had no confidence in Julian, and it occurred to him vaguely and with a sense of surprise that if the security so superficially founded should prove false, the blow would be somewhat disproportionate to the lightness of the nature on which it must fall. The next instant he recollected how largely her own actions would have contributed to bring about the blow, and he dismissed her sternly from his thoughts as she passed out of the room.

Mrs. Romayne went straight home, though she had numerous calls on her list for the afternoon; her eyes were even desperately bright and defiant; and that same evening Marston Loring received a note asking him to come and see her on the following day.

He found her waiting for him in the drawing-room at the hour she had appointed, and she plunged into the matter in hand with an affectation of spontaneous confidence which was most effective.

She had sent for him in his capacity of fellow-conspirator, she told him; she was in a little perplexity and she was turning to him, as usual—this with a charming smile—to help her. From this prelude she went on to speak of the strange change which had come about in the relations between herself and Julian on the one hand, and the Pomeroys on the other. Loring’s keen eyes had detected this change some time since—by this time, indeed, it was being whispered about somewhat freely—but he only listened with grave attention. The upshot of her speech was: did Loring know anything about it? Had Julian said anything? Had he spoken of any quarrel, of any misunderstanding? Had his friend any kind of clue to give her as to his feelings on the subject?

The ease and gaiety of her manner, which strove to give to the whole thing something the air of a joke, was disturbed and broken as she came to the point by a feverishness about which there was nothing gay or light. And some uncertainty as to how far she had gone seemed to pervade her mind and to produce a feeling that some kind of explanation was necessary.

“You see,” she said, “it isn’t always safe to go to the fountain-head in these little matters! A young man doesn’t always care to be questioned by his mother! One might ‘give offence,’ you know!” Her tone was playful, but her eyes were filled with the nervous fear which lurked in them so often when she and Julian were alone together, and the look on her face as she spoke her last words seemed to give to that fear a definite object. It was the fear of “giving offence” to her son.

Loring put the explanation aside with a smile, but he had no words of enlightenment for her. Julian, he said, had preserved a total silence on the subject.

“I will see what I can do,” he said finally, with a smile that cancelled the offensiveness of the intention conveyed of “pumping” his friend. “And we will confer further. Meanwhile, I know you will like to hear that his financial proceedings are prospering exceedingly, and are discretion itself!”

But the further conference, which took place in a day or two, was entirely fruitless as far as its nominal purpose was concerned. Loring did not reveal to Mrs. Romayne the exceeding brevity and decision with which Julian had dealt with any and every attempt to lead the conversation towards the Pomeroys, but he gave her to understand that at present he had nothing to tell her.

One night, about a week later, when she and her son came home in the dawn of the July day from a series of “at homes,” Mrs. Romayne, instead of saying good night to Julian at the door of her room, as was her custom, laid her hand suddenly on his arm and drew him just across the threshold. Her face was white to the very lips, and there was a set desperation in it stronger even than the fear with which her eyes were full. Her voice, as she spoke, was breathless and uncertain as though her heart beat with painful rapidity.

“Julian,” she said, “what is it that has gone wrong between you and Maud Pomeroy?”

A flash, so quick in the passing that its intense bitterness was not to be detected, passed across Julian’s face; it seemed to leave him armed with an expression of determined brightness which defied all emotion or sentiment.

“I don’t know that anything has ‘gone wrong,’ dear,” he said lightly.

His mother’s hold on his arm tightened desperately.

“I saw what happened to-night in the supper-room,” she said. “Won’t you”—her voice broke, and there came to it a strangely beseeching note—“won’t you tell me what it is?”

Julian’s face grew rather set, and he paused a moment. Then he said, still in the same tone:

“It is nothing that I need worry you about, dear.”

“Something might be done. If I knew what it was it could be set right, I know.”

“No, dear!” The words came from Julian quickly and instantly, and there was a decision and significance behind his light tone now. Her speech had created a necessity, and he rose instinctively to meet it. “I’m awfully sorry to distress you, but I assure you nothing can be done. A girl must be allowed to know her own mind, you know. And a certain little question asked and answered, the only thing left to the fellow is to retire gracefully. I’m awfully sorry you are cut up about it; I was afraid you would be. Never mind, dear. I’m in no particular hurry.”

He had gained in fluency and expansiveness of manner as he proceeded; the expedient had only occurred to him on the spur of the moment; and as he finished he bent down and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

“Good night,” he said. “Sleep as well as I intend to do.”

He left her with a nod and a smile, shutting the door behind him, and Mrs. Romayne stood for a moment motionless, as she had received his kiss, staring at the door through which he had disappeared. Then she began to rub her hands feebly against one another as though a great cold had seized her. She was trembling from head to foot.

“Failed!”

She spoke the word half aloud in a low, shivering tone, which gave to its isolated utterance a strangely weird effect.