Jacob lingered for a month in Monte Carlo. While he found little to attract him in the gambling or the social side of the place, the glorious climate, the perpetual sunshine, the fine air of La Turbie, and a pleasing succession of golf victories helped him to pass the time pleasantly. He spent a week at Cannes on the way back, making wonderful progress in his tennis, and from there he hired a motor-car and spent a fortnight at Aix. He reached London early in May, to find Dauncey unchanged and his own affairs prosperous. During all this time he had had no word of or from Sybil Bultiwell. He went almost directly to his cottage at Marlingden, where he found Mrs. Harris eagerly awaiting his arrival, and over the supper table, Dauncey and he and a rejuvenated Nora talked over that evening when the two men had arrived home in the motor-car, laden with strange packages and overflowing with their marvellous news.

“Life has been so wonderful ever since,” Nora murmured. “Dick looks ten years younger, and I feel it. The children you can see for yourself. I wonder,” she went on a little timidly, as she realised her host’s peculiar aversion to expressed gratitude, “I wonder whether you ever realise, Jacob, what it means to have taken two people from a struggle which was becoming misery and to have made them utterly and completely happy.”...

Jacob thought of her words as he lingered for an hour in his little sitting-room that night. His own memory travelled backwards. He realised the joy which he had felt at paying his debts, the even greater joy of saving the Daunceys from despair. He thought again of the small pleasures which his affluence had brought, the sense of complacency, almost of dignity, which it had engendered. There were many men, he knew, who thought him the most fortunate amongst all their acquaintance. And was he, he wondered? He looked across at the light in the Daunceys’ bedroom and saw it extinguished. He looked back with a sigh to his empty room. He had read many books since the days of his prosperity, but books had never meant very much to him. He realised, in those moments of introspection, his weakness and his failure. His inclinations were all intensely human. He loved kind words, happy faces, flowers and children. He was one of those for whom the joys and gaieties of the demimonde were a farce, to whom the delights of the opposite sex could only present themselves in the form of one person and in one manner. He was full of sentiments, full of easily offended prejudices. Fate had placed in his hands the power to command a life which might have been as varied as grand opera, and all that he desired was the life which Dauncey had found and was living.

Upstairs were the Harrises, sleeping together in comfort and happiness, the creatures of his bounty, his grateful and faithful servants. And he knew well how both of those two across the way, whom he envied, blessed his name. It was a happiness to think of them, and yet an impersonal happiness. He longed humanly for the other and more direct kind.

Dauncey found cause for some anxiety in Jacob’s demeanour during the course of the next few weeks.

“You know, Jacob,” he said, “in one way I never saw you look so well in your life. That bronze you got in the south of France is most becoming, and, if you’ll forgive my saying so, you seem to have gained poise lately, to have lost that slight self-consciousness with which you looked out upon life just at first. And yet you don’t look as I’d like to see you. I haven’t even heard you laugh as you used to.”

Jacob nodded.

“I’m all right, Dick,” he assured his friend. “Fact is, I think I am suffering from a surfeit of good things. Everything in the world’s lying ready to my hands, and I don’t quite know which way to turn.”

“Did you hear anything of Miss Bultiwell while you were abroad?” Dauncey asked a little abruptly.

“Not a word,” Jacob replied. “Her last letter to me seemed to end things pretty effectually.”

Dauncey spoke words under his breath which were real and blasphemous.

“Can’t you put her out of your thoughts, old chap?”

“I think I have, and yet the place where she was is empty. And, Dick,” Jacob went on, “I don’t know where or how to fill it. You see, I’ve crowds of acquaintances, but no friends except you and Nora. One or two rich city people ask me to their houses, and the whole of Bohemia, I suppose, is open to me. I never see any women belonging to my city friends who appeal in the least to my imagination, and there’s something wrong about the other world, so far as I am concerned. We are not out for the same thing.”

“I think I understand,” Dauncey said quietly.

“I expect you do,” Jacob continued. “You ought to, because you’re exactly where I want to be. I want a wife who is just good and sweet and affectionate. She needn’t be clever, she needn’t be well-born, and she need know no more about Society than I do. I want her just to make a home and give me children. And, Dick, with all that million of mine I don’t know where to look for her.”

“She’ll come,” Dauncey declared encouragingly. “She is sure to come. You are young and you’ll keep young. You live like a man, of course, but it’s a sober, self-respecting life. You’ve heaps of time. And that reminds me. Could you join us in a little celebration to-night? My wife has a cousin from the country staying with her, and I have promised to take them out to dine and to a show.”

“I have nothing to do,” Jacob replied. “I shall be delighted.”

It was a little too obvious. Nora’s cousin from the country, a very nice and estimable person in her way, was not equal to the occasion. She wore her ill-fitting clothes without grace or confidence. She giggled repeatedly, and her eyes seldom left Jacob’s, as though all the time she were bidding for his approval. She was just well enough looking and no more, the sort of woman who would have looked almost pretty on her wedding day, a little dowdy most of the time during the next five years, and either a drudge or a nuisance afterwards, according to her circumstances. Jacob was very polite and very glad when the evening was over. His host wrung his hand as they parted.

“Not my fault, old chap,” he whispered. “Nora would try it. She hadn’t seen Margaret for three or four years.”

“That’s all right, Dick,” Jacob answered, with unconvincing cheerfulness. “Very pleasant time.”

Jacob had endured a cheap dinner at a popular restaurant and circle seats at a music hall with uncomplaining good humour, but the evening, if anything, had increased his depression. He wandered into one of the clubs of which he was a member, only to find there was not a soul there whom he had ever seen before in his life. He came out within half an hour, but a spirit of unrest had seized him. Instead of going up to his rooms, he wandered into the foyer of the great hotel, in the private part of which his suite was situated, and watched the people coming out from supper. Again, as he sat alone, he was conscious of that feeling of isolation. Every man seemed to be accompanied by a woman who for the moment, at any rate, was content to give her whole attention to the task of entertaining her companion. There were little parties, older people some of them, but always with that connecting link of friendship and good-fellowship. Jacob sat grimly back in the shadows and watched. Perhaps it would have been better, he thought, if he had remained a poor traveller. He would have found some little, hardly used, teashop waitress, or perhaps the daughter of one of his customers, or a little shopgirl whom he had hustled in the Tube,—some one whose life might have touched his and brought into it the genial flavour of companionship. As it was—

“If it isn’t Mr. Pratt!”

He started. One of the very smartest of the little crowd who flowed around him had paused before his chair. He rose to his feet.

“Lady Powers!” he exclaimed.

“Ancient history,” she confided. “I have been married weeks—it seems ages. This is my husband—Mr. Frank Lloyd.”

Jacob found himself shaking hands with a vacuous-looking youth who turned away again almost immediately to speak to some acquaintances.

“You don’t bear me any ill-will, Mr. Pratt?”

“None except that broken dinner engagement,” he replied.

“I wrote to you,” she reminded him. “I did not dare to come after the way those others had behaved.”

He sighed. “All the same I was disappointed.”

She made a little grimace. Her husband was bidding farewell to his friends. She leaned towards him confidentially.

“Perhaps if I had,” she whispered, “there would have been no Mr. Frank Lloyd.”...

Back to his chair and solitude. Jacob made his way presently through the darkened rooms and passages to his own apartments, where a servant was waiting for him, the evening papers were laid out, whisky and soda and sandwiches were on the sideboard. His valet relieved him of his dresscoat and smoothed the smoking jacket around him.

“Anything more I can do for you to-night, sir?”

Jacob looked around the empty room, looked at his luxurious single easy-chair, at all the resources of comfort provided for him, and shook his head.

“Nothing, Richards,” he answered shortly. “Good night!”

“Good night, sir!”

Jacob subsided into the easy-chair, filled his pipe mechanically, lit and smoked it mechanically, knocked out the ashes when he had finished it, turned out the lights and passed into his bedroom, undressed and went to bed, still without any interest or thought for what he was doing. When he found himself still awake in a couple of hours’ time, he took himself to task fiercely.

“This is liver,” he muttered. “I shall now relax, take twelve deep breaths, and sleep.”

Which he did.