Christian discovered that he was not sorry to be alone. Cora’s company had been amusing and vivifying, no doubt, but it was even better now to have his own thoughts. He observed with relief that others in the stalls were smoking; tobacco as a rule had not very much meaning for him, but now he lit a large cigar from the dinner-case in his pocket, and stretching himself in his chair, proceeded to enjoy it. He kept his glance, in an indolent fashion, upon the stage, but his mind roamed far and wide.

Cora, in returning to explain that it would not be possible for her to stay till the time for Covent Garden, had ingenuously sat on for nearly another hour, cheering him with her lively prattle. She asked him many questions about himself, his diversions, his tastes, his relations with Lord Julius and Emanuel. He wondered now if these queries had been quite as artless as they seemed at the time. There rose up before him, in retrospect, certain occasional phases of her manner which suggested something furtive. She had watched the stage, and the doorway leading from it, with a kind of detached uneasiness on which he now languidly speculated. It occurred to him again to wonder if her husband was really in the building. Christian found himself thinking of this cousin of his almost with compassion. Poor devil! Was his fate not even more tragic than that of the others who were merely dead? He regretted now that he had not asked Cora point-blank as to his presence. His mood was so tolerant to-night that even the unforgivable insult to his father lost its sharp outlines, and became only a hasty phrase, the creature of imperative provocation.

In her final leave-taking, Cora had genially proffered her services if he desired to know any or all of the young ladies—and he had begged to be excused. Dicky Westland came down to the stalls later on, and shamefacedly linked a similar offer to his apologies for his prolonged neglect of his guest. But Christian protested that he was enjoying himself thoroughly. He was never less sleepy in his life; he did not want a drink; he would not dream of wishing to go until his friend was entirely ready. “You cannot realize,” he concluded, with his persuasive smile, “how strange and interesting this all is to me.”

But when Dicky had returned again to the stage, Christian paid less attention than ever to the diverting spectacle. His thoughts reverted obstinately to Captain Edward—? and to that portion of the family of which he was the congenital type. Was not that really the sort of man who should have the title? There seemed a cloud of negative reasons, but were these not sentimental abstractions? Should the duke not be a rough, hard sportsman, a man with a passion for horses and dogs and gunpowder saturating his veins? One who loved the country for its rude, toilsome out-of-door sports, and who liked best in town the primitive amusements of the natural man? He figured Edward in his mind’s eye most readily as puffing and cursing over a rat-hole with his terriers—or as watching with a shine of steel in his blue eyes the blood-stained progress of a prize-fight. And truly, were these not the things that a duke of Glastonbury of right belonged to?

He could not think of Lord Julius and of Emanuel as being Torrs at all. The older man had the physical inheritance of the family, it was true, but he was almost as much estranged from its ideals as that extraordinary son of his. They both were grotesquely out of the picture of English aristocratie life, whether in country or town. And he himself—how absolutely he also was out of the picture!

The immensity of the position which his grandfather’s death would devolve upon him had been present in his mind, it seemed sleeping as well as waking, for half a year. At the outset he had thrilled at the prospect; sometimes still he was able to reassure himself about it, and to profess to himself confidence that when the emergency came, he would be equal to it. But more often, in these latter days, the outlook depressed him. Of course nothing grievous would happen to him, in any event. He would be assured of an excellent living to the end of his days, with an exceptional amount of social deference from those about him, and relative freedom to do what he liked. He could marry and rear a family of lords and ladies; he could have his speeches in the House of Lords or elsewhere printed in the “Times”; if he looked about in America, he could secure a bride with perhaps millions to her dower. There was, in any case, the reasonable likelihood that he would be, to some extent, the heir of Lord Julius and Emanuel, in the latter part of his life. Thus he could go on, when he set himself to the task, piling-up reasons why he ought to view the future with buoyant serenity—to count himself among the happiest of men.

But then—was his not all self-deception? Did he not know in his heart that he was not happy?—that this gilded and ornate career awaiting him really repelled all his finer senses? To-night as he followed his thoughts behind the transparent screen of whisking dresses and jolting figures upon which his outer vision rested, the impulse to escape the whole thing rose strong within him. Already he had sworn that he would no longer weary himself with the meaningless and distasteful routine of social obligations in London. Why should he not plunge boldly forward beyond that, and say that he would make no further sacrifices of any sort to the conventions of mediocrity?

He lit another cigar and, rising, walked about a little by himself at the side of the stalls, his hands deep in his pockets, his brows knitted in formative introspection.

First of all, it was clear that Emanuel’s hopes about his taking up the System were doomed. It was not in him to assume such a part. He had not the capacity for such work; even if he had, he lacked both the tremendous driving energy and the enthusiasm.

But when Emanuel learned this, then he would be angry, and he would cover over no more money to that account at the bank. Eh bien! It couldn’t be helped. Christian recalled that he had still at that blessed bank more than sixty thousand francs!—truly a prodigious sum, when one thought of it soberly. The question whether this sum ought not to be given back to Emanuel, under certain circumstances, seemed to have settled itself. When it had first occurred to him that afternoon, it had suggested a good many moral difficulties. But it was really simplicity itself, as he considered it now. There were all those lean and poverty-stricken years of his youth and childhood to be remembered—and, stretching back beyond that, those other years of his father’s exile before he was born—nearly forty in all. The intelligent thing was to regard the three thousand pounds as a sort of restitution fund, to be spread out over the whole of that long period. Viewed in this light, the annual fraction of it was a paltry matter. Besides, Emanuel had expressly declared that no conditions whatever were attached to the money. Christian saw that he could make his mind quite easy on that score.

So then, there were sixty thousand francs! With that he might live admirably, even luxuriously, on the Continent, until his grandfather’s death. That event would of course alter everything. There would then come automatically to him—no matter where he was or what he did—a certain fixed income, which he understood to be probably over rather than under seventy-five thousand francs a year. This—still on the Continent—would be almost incredible wealth! There was really no limit to the soul-satisfying possibilities it opened before him. He would have a yacht on the Mediterranean; he would have a little chateau in the marvelous green depths of the Styrian Mountains—of which a boyhood friend had told him with such tender reverence of memory. He would see Innsbruck and Moscow, and, if he liked, even Samarkand and China. Why, he could go round the world in his yacht, if he chose—to remote spice islands and tropical seas! He could be a duke when, and as much, as it pleased him to be one. Instead of being the slave to his position and title, he would make them minister to him. He would do original things—realize his own inner fancies and predilections. If the whim seized him to climb Mount Ararat, or to cross the Sahara with a caravan of his own servants—that he would do. But above all things—now and henceforth forever, he would be a free man! He laughed grimly as he thought how slight was the actual difference between the life of pauper bondage he had led up to last October, and the existence which polite England and London had imposed upon him ever since. The second set of chains were of precious metal—that was all. Well, hereafter there would be no fetters of any description!

“I’m quite ready to go now, old man, if you are,” Dicky Westland said at some belated stage of this reverie. He had approached without being seen by his friend, and he had to pull at Christian’s sleeve to attract his attention. “I fancy you’ve been walking in your sleep,” he laughed, in comment upon this.

Christian shook himself, and, blinking at Dicky, protested that he had never been more wide awake in his life. “I go only if you’re entirely ready,” he said. “Don’t dream of leaving on my account I have been extremely interested, I assure you.”

“Every fellow has his own notions of enjoyment,” reflected Westland, with drowsy philosophy, as they went up the stairs toward the stage. “I tried to explain your point of view to some of the girls up here, but I’m not sure they quite grasped it. They were dying to have me bring you up and make you dance, you know. By George, I had a job to keep Dolly Montressor from coming down and fetching you, off her own bat.”

“How should they know or care about me?” asked Christian. “I didn’t expect to be pointed out.”

“My dear man,” retorted Dicky, sleepily, “no one pointed you out. They all know you by sight as well as they do George Edwards. It isn’t too late, still, you know—if you really would like to be introduced.”

Christian shook his head with resolution, as they halted at the wings. “Truly, no!” he repeated. “But I should like a glass of wine and a sandwich, if we can get past the stage. I’m not an atom sleepy, but I’m hungry and thirsty.”

On their way through a narrow, shadowed defile of huge canvas-stretched frames of deal, they passed two young men, one much taller than the other, who had their heads bent together in some low-voiced, private conversation. Christian glanced at them casually, and was struck with the notion that they observed him in turn, and exchanged comment upon his approach. He looked at them with a keener scrutiny as he went by—and it seemed to him that there was something familiar in the face of the larger man—who indeed looked away upon the instant their eyes met.

“Did you see those men?” he asked Westland, in an undertone, a moment later. “Do you know them?”

“Those we just passed?” Dicky looked over his shoulder. “I don’t know the thin chap, but the other fellow is Gus Torr—why, of course—your cousin. Somehow, I never think of you as belonging to that lot—I mean, being related to them. Of course—that was his sister-in-law you were sitting with. Why did you ask if I knew him?”

“Nothing—I was not sure if it was he—I’ve seen him only once,” Christian replied, with an assumption of indifference. “I remember having noticed then how much he looked like his brother.”

“Yes—poor devils!” commented Dicky, as they entered the manager’s room. Apparently it was in his mind to say more, but the place was crowded, and the problem of getting through the throng to the food and drink monopolized his attention.

Some minutes later, while Christian stood in another corridor, waiting for his friend to bring their hats and coats from the mysteriously elusive spot where he had left them, he overheard the mention of his name. Two women’s voices, wholly unknown to him, came from behind an improvised partition of screens near at hand, with great distinctness.

One of them said: “He spells his name ‘Tower,’ you know. I understand the idea is to make people forget who his father was.”

“Good job, too!” replied the other voice.

Christian turned abruptly, and strode off in the direction whither Dicky had disappeared. “After forty years!” he murmured hotly to himself. “After forty years!” and clenched his fists till the nails hurt his palms.

The two young men walked homeward, arm in arm, through silent streets over which the dawn was spreading its tentative first lights. It was colder than they had thought, and the morning air was at once misty and fresh. In Leicester Square the scent of lilacs came to them; beside the pale, undefined bulk of the squat statue they caught the lavender splash of color which was sister to the perfume.

“By Jove, it’s spring!” said Dicky. He pointed out the flowers, and then, still drawing Christian’s arm to turn his attention to the square, recalled to him as they moved that this was the oldtime haunt of foreigners in London. “Dickens’s villain in ‘Little Dorrit,’ you know—the fellow whose mustache went up and his nose went down—I never can remember his name—he lived here. In those days, all that sort of chappies lived here—the adventurers and jailbirds who had made their own countries too hot to hold them.”

Westland’s insistence upon this theme had no purpose other than to divert Christian’s attention while they passed the Empire. He was tired, and profoundly disinclined to any renewal of the discussion about the promenade. He encountered with vague surprise, therefore, the frowning glance which Christian, half halting, bent upon him. The young man’s displeasure was marked, but Dicky for the life of him could not imagine why. He tightened his hold on the other’s arm and quickened their pace.

But Christian, after a few yards, suddenly withdrew his arm altogether. “I do not like to walk so fast,” he said, with a sharp note in his voice.

Dicky regarded him with puzzled apprehension. “What’s up, old man?” he asked, almost pleadingly. “Has anything gone wrong?”

Christian, still with knitted brows, parted his lips to speak. Then he seemed to reconsider his intention, and let his face soften as he paused. “No—nothing at all,” he replied, after a moment. He smiled a little to reassure the other. “It was nothing at all,” he repeated. “Only I am nervous and excited to-night—this morning, I should say—and my head is full of projects. It is twelve hours since you came to me—and the whole world has changed meanwhile. I see everything different. I am not altered to your eyes—but none the less, I am not at all, in any respect, the man you took to dine with you. You have not observed anything—but it is a revolution that has occurred under your very nose, Mr. Dicky Westland.”

“I’m too sleepy to observe anything,” the other declared. “I couldn’t tell a revolution from a—from a hot-potato can.”

The comparison had forced itself upon Westland’s jaded mind through the medium of his weary eyes. There before them, by the curb at the corner, stood the dingy wheeled-oven of the streets, the sullen red glow of its lower door making a strange patch of fiery light upon the ragged trousers of the man in charge. He was a dirty and undersized creature, and he looked up at the two young gentlemen in evening dress with a speculative, yet hardly hopeful, eye.

Christian stopped short. “Ah, this is very good,” he said, with a brightening face. “I have never eaten a potato from a can.”

Dicky sighed, but resigned himself with only a languid protest: “You have to eat so much else besides the potato,” he commented dolefully.

The man opened an upper door, and then drew from under the machine a twisted wad of old newspaper, which, being unwound, revealed a gray heap of salt. “How many, cap’n?” he demanded, briefly.

Christian had been glancing across the Circus meanwhile—to where, in the misty vagueness of dawn, Piccadilly opened between its tall, shapely corners, and beyond, the curved yellowish sweep of Regent Street began. The dim light revealed some lurking figures to his eyes.

“Can you call over those women?” he asked the potato-man.

A tall, fresh-faced young policeman came upon the group round the Criterion corner. Although the pounding of his thick boots on the pavement had been audible long before his appearance, he regarded them with the slightly dramatic air of one who has deftly surprised a group of conspirators. The potato-man looked from Christian to the officer and made no reply.

Christian drew some silver from his pocket, shaking off the restraining hand Westland tried to lay on his arm. “Is there any objection, constable,” he inquired, “to my buying potatoes for those friends of ours over there? It is a cold morning.”

The policeman’s glance ranged from the white ties of the young gentlemen to the coins in Christian’s palm. His official expression relaxed. “I dare say it’ll do no ’arm, sir,” he replied with courtesy. He even lent himself to the enterprise by stooping down and beating a certain number of strokes with his baton on the pavement.

“How many times did he strike?” Dicky made whispered inquiry. “That’s a new dodge to me.”

New or old, it was efficient. Forlorn shapes began to emerge from the shadows of the big streets opposite, and move forward across the empty open space. Others stole noiselessly in from the byways of Leicester Square. There were perhaps a dozen in all when the potato-man made his census—poorly dressed, fagged, bold-faced, furtive-eyed women. They spoke in monotonous, subdued tones among themselves. There were to be heard German, French, Belgian French, cockney English, and Lancashire English. Two of them pulled at the sleeve of the potato-man to make him hurry.

Christian, regarding his motley guests, found himself neither touched nor entertained. They seemed as stupid as they were squalid. With a gesture of decision he gave the money to the policeman.

“Pay for it all,” he directed, “and if more come, give them a look-in, too—and keep what is left for yourself.”

“Now then, Frenchy!” broke in the constable, sharply. “Mind what you’re at! Pass Germany the salt!” With an abrupt change to civility, he turned to Christian. “Right you are, sir!” he said.

Dicky laughed drowsily. “It’s like the Concert of Europe,” he declared. “Shall we go on?”

They moved down the broad pavement, again arm in arm, breathing in slowly the new, keen air, and observing in a silence which was full of tacit comment the beautiful termination of the street before them: the dark figures of the Crimean monument standing in grim relief against the morning light, the stately palace beyond, with its formal portals of club buildings, its embowered statues, its huge column towering ponderously above the pale green of spring in the park—all gray and cool and, as it were, thoughtfully solemn in the hush of daybreak.

“Ah, yes—this wonderful London!” sighed Christian, as they halted at the Continental corner. He spread his hand to embrace the prospect before them. “How right you were! I have not learned to know it at all. But I begin now! If you will walk through the square with me—there is something I wish to say.”

This something did not get itself said till they halted within this somber, slate-colored square. Christian paused before a big, pretentious house of gloomy, and even forbidding aspect—a front of sooty stucco, with cornices of ashen-hued stone, and many windows masked with sullen brown shades.

“This was our town house a hundred years ago,” he said meditatively. “My father was born here. My grandfather sold it when the entail was broken. Until this afternoon, it was my fixed resolve to buy it back again. I said always to myself: ‘If I am to have a house in London, it must be this old one of ours in St. James’s.’ But that is all changed now. At least, it is no longer a resolve.”

Dicky gazed at him with sleepy eyes. “How do you mean?” he asked, perfunctorily.

“Wake up now, and I will tell you!” Christian, with a lingering glance, as of renunciation, at the mansion, began to walk again. “This is it. You said you were eager to be some colonial official’s secretary—to have three hundred pounds—and the yellow fever. To obtain this, you expend all your energies, you and your relations. Well, then—why will you not be my secretary instead? You shall have more than three hundred pounds—and no yellow fever.”

Westland had roused himself, and looked inquiringly now into the other’s face. “What do you need of a secretary?” he objected, half jestingly. “If you want to talk about it after you’ve come into the thing—I don’t say that I shouldn’t be glad-to consider it. But the deuce of it is——”

“No—I wish it to begin now, this morning, this hour—this minute!” Christian spoke peremptorily.

Dicky, pondering, shook his head. “No, you mustn’t insist on settling anything now,” he decided. “It isn’t regular, you know. If you—really—want to propose something immediate—why, I’ll call and talk with you to-morrow—or, that is to say, this afternoon. But I couldn’t possibly let you commit yourself to anything of that sort now.”

Christian frowned at his friend. “You speak of what you will let me do!” he said.

“In your opinion—I see it!—you think I have not sober command of myself, am not responsible—is that it?”

“Nonsense! I’ve said nothing of the sort,” protested the other. “Of course, you’re perfectly all right—but we’re both tired and sleepy, and you’re not so accustomed to go home by daylight as I am—and it wouldn’t be at all the thing for me to close a bargain with you now. Can’t you see what I mean? I wouldn’t play threepenny ÉcartÉ with you at this hour in the morning—and I’m damned if I’m going to let you in for three hundred a year for the rest of my life. Shall I come round, say, at luncheon time?”

“I shall not be in,” said Christian, curtly. He looked at his companion, and then past him at the trees in the square, in vexed rumination. “What I have it in my mind to do”—he continued, vaguely, after a pause—“it is not a thing for delay. It is in my blood to do it at once. It was my impulse to make you my comrade in it—but of course, since you have your reservations and doubts, there need be nothing more said about it.”

The shrug of the shoulders which emphasized these last words nettled Westland, and at the same time helped him to repress his annoyance. It lent to the whole episode just that savor of foreign eccentricity which appealed to the amiable tolerance of the islander.

“My dear man,” he urged, gently, “I haven’t the slightest notion what it is that you’re so keen about—but whatever it is, do go home and sleep on it, and make up your mind calmly after breakfast. It’s no good deciding important questions, and striking out new lines, and all that sort of thing, at this hour in the morning. Nobody ever does it, you know. It simply can’t be done.”

“Good-night!” said Christian, proffering his hand. “You are right; it is high time for those who are sleepy to go to bed I won’t drag you round to Duke Street.”

Dicky looked at him doubtfully. “You do wrong to be angry, you know,” he said.

“But that is your error—I am not in the least angry—I beg you to believe it,” cried Christian. His eyes beamed genially in proof of his assertion, and he put heartiness into his voice. “For a minute I was disappointed—shall I say vexed?—but not any more. How should I quarrel with you for not beholding things through my eyes? To me, something is a giant; you perceive that it is a windmill. Eh bien! We do not convince each other—but surely we do not quarrel.”

“Oh, I am game enough to play Sancho to your Don,” expostulated Dicky, with a readiness which Christian had not looked for, “but I draw the line at starting out on an empty stomach, and when we’re too sleepy to stand. Well, what shall it be?” He took the hand offered him, and strove to signify by his cordial grasp that no trace of a misunderstanding remained. “Shall I look you up, say, at two o’clock?”

“I do not think I shall be there. Goodnight!” responded Christian, and the two parted.