When the conclusion was reached, and Millner stood at the goal, the golden trophy in his grasp, his first conscious thought was one of regret that the struggle was over.  He would have liked to prolong their talk for the purely aesthetic pleasure of making Mr. Spence lose time, and, better still, of making him forget that he was losing it.  The sense of advantage that the situation conferred was so great that when Mr. Spence rose it was as if Millner were dismissing him, and when he reached his hand toward the cigar-box it seemed to be one of Millner’s cigars that he was taking.

IV

THERE had been only one condition attached to the transaction:  Millner was to speak to Draper about the Bible Class.

The condition was easy to fulfil.  Millner was confident of his power to deflect his young friend’s purpose; and he knew the opportunity would be given him before the day was over.  His professional duties despatched, he had only to go up to his room to wait.  Draper nearly always looked in on him for a moment before dinner:  it was the hour most propitious to their elliptic interchange of words and silences.

Meanwhile, the waiting was an occupation in itself.  Millner looked about his room with new eyes.  Since the first thrill of initiation into its complicated comforts—­the shower-bath, the telephone, the many-jointed reading-lamp and the vast mirrored presses through which he was always hunting his scant outfit—­Millner’s room had interested him no more than a railway-carriage in which he might have been travelling.  But now it had acquired a sort of historic significance as the witness of the astounding change in his fate.  It was Corsica, it was Brienne—­it was the kind of spot that posterity might yet mark with a tablet.  Then he reflected that he should soon be leaving it, and the lustre of its monumental mahogany was veiled in pathos.  Why indeed should he linger on in bondage?  He perceived with a certain surprise that the only thing he should regret would be leaving Draper. ...

It was odd, it was inconsequent, it was almost exasperating, that such a regret should obscure his triumph.  Why in the world should he suddenly take to regretting Draper?  If there were any logic in human likings, it should be to Mr. Spence that he inclined.  Draper, dear lad, had the illusion of an “intellectual sympathy” between them; but that, Millner knew, was an affair of reading and not of character.  Draper’s temerities would always be of that kind; whereas his own—­well, his own, put to the proof, had now definitely classed him with Mr. Spence rather than with Mr. Spence’s son.  It was a consequence of this new condition—­of his having thus distinctly and irrevocably classed himself—­that, when Draper at length brought upon the scene his shy shamble and his wistful smile, Millner, for the first time, had to steel himself against them instead of yielding to their charm.