“I thought I’d come and see Lois,” said Mrs. Buck, effulgently smiling, as George handed her out of the car.  “How is the dear thing?  You just flying off?”

“You’ll do her all the good in the world,” George replied.  “I can’t stop.  I have to leave town to-night, and I’m full up.”

“Oh yes!  The Opening!  How perfectly splendid!” Tiny bubbles showed between her glorious lips.  “What a shame it is poor Lois isn’t able to go!”

“Yes,” said George.  “But look here!  Don’t you go and tell her so.  That’s quite the wrong tack.”

“I see!  I see!” said Mrs. Buck, gazing at him as one who was capable of subtle comprehensions.  “By the way,” she added, as she turned to mount the steps, “I ran across Everard Lucas at the Berkeley to-day.  Lunching there.  I said I was coming here.  He told me to tell you, if I saw you, that old Mr. Haim or Home or some such name was dead.  He said you’d be interested.”

“By Jove!” George ejaculated.  “Is he?  Haven’t seen him for years and years.”

II

He got into his car and drove off at speed.  Beneath his off-hand words to Mrs. Buckingham Smith he was conscious of a quickly growing, tender sympathy for Marguerite Haim.  The hardness in him was dissolved almost instantaneously.  He saw Marguerite, who had been adamantine in the difference which separated them, as the image of pliancy, sweetness, altruism, and devotion; and he saw her lips and the rapt glance of her eyes as beautiful as in the past.  What a soft, soothing, assuaging contrast with the difficult Lois, so imperious and egoistic! (An unforgettable phrase of Lois’s had inhabited his mind for over a decade:  “Fancy quarrelling over a man!”) He had never met Marguerite since their separation, and for years he had heard nothing whatever about her; he did not under-estimate the ordeal of meeting her again.  Yet he at once decided that he must meet her again.  He simply could not ignore her in her bereavement and new loneliness.  To write to her would be absurd; it would be a cowardly evasion; moreover, he could not frame a letter.  He must prove to her and to himself that he had a sense of decent kindliness which would rise above conventional trifles when occasion demanded.

At the top of Elm Park Gardens, instead of turning east towards Piccadilly he turned west in the direction of the Workhouse tower.  And thus he exposed the unreality of the grandiose pleas with which professional men impose on their wives and on themselves.  A few minutes earlier his appointment at the club (not Pickering’s, to which, however, he still belonged, but a much greater institution, the Artists, in Albemarle Street) had been an affair of extreme importance, upon which might depend his future career, for did it not concern negotiations for a London factory, which was to be revolutionary in design, and to cost L150,000, and which, erected, would form a permanent advertisement