vi

It was not until he was indoors, and sitting rather moodily by a waning fire, that Edgar returned to some of Gaythorpe's remarks. He did this in an instinctive effort to explain the moodiness of which he felt suddenly conscious. True, he had felt moments of melancholy while abroad; but those had been explicable by the fact that he was friendless in strange cities. Now the case was different. Somewhere within his heart there was an almost bitter resentment of Gaythorpe's cynicism on the subjects of women and marriage. At the moment he had accepted them as he would normally have done. They returned with added venom to his memory. The first thought—that perhaps Gaythorpe had been unhappy in his marriage—Edgar dismissed as sentimentality. The truer explanation was probably that the old man was expressing a fundamental cynicism, due to the fact that his own happiness had left him occasion to view the miseries of others. Edgar, too, had witnessed those miseries. He was still unable to explain them except in individual cases. He was thoughtful and none too happy. There had been menace—the deeper because he had concluded it to be unconscious—in Gaythorpe's insistence on the reality of a young woman towards whom Edgar felt a helpful eagerness.

"What a fool I was to give him such an opening!" he thought.

Slowly it was as though Edgar fell asleep. He saw two clear eyes, which he thought to hold all the truth and beauty in the world. He heard spoken words—words that were almost all that Patricia had ever said to him. The sense of her presence was extraordinarily strong ... a presence that was more than presence, for Edgar was quite poignantly imagining a real Patricia, so much more beautiful than she would seem with others present. His lips moved in unspoken words. His hands were gently raised from the arms of his chair, and extended. If desire and imagination had the power to call those we love to our sides, then surely Edgar would have awakened with Patricia in his arms. He was experiencing a reality of communion which only those who love deeply can conceive. The emotion he then felt transcended anything he had ever known.

And then his eyes opened, and he saw the extended arms with something like shame. The lips so lately parted were again firmly set, and he coloured faintly. Not thus was a woman to be won, he knew. And yet the vision had served to make his heart clear to him. He had seen Patricia as she had been at their first meeting, in all the smoke and din and brilliance of Monty's party. Again he had glimpsed Dalrymple and Monty; again he had exchanged with Harry Greenlees that measuring glance. He rose from the chair, and went across to the fireplace, his face lighted by a sudden flicker of flame. Now he knew why he had been so sensitive to Gaythorpe's allusions and his bitterness. Now, too, he realised what had been hidden from him. Never would he have been divided by the sharp impulse to strike or to kiss Patricia if she had not been the only person in the world capable of causing him pain. He loved deeply.