“My dear Jack,” she said, sweetly, “how absurd of you!  It was simply the contrast of your eyes peering over Leonard’s hair It was like a gorgeous sunset with a black cloud overhead.”  She laughed.  “Do you see what I mean, Eve?” She affected to see Eve for the first time.

Eve had been looking calmly ahead.  She turned now and smiled serenely.  Loder felt no vibration of the arm he held, yet by an instant intuition he knew that the two women were antagonistic.  He experienced it with the divination that follows upon a moment of acute suspense.  He understood it, as he had understood Lillian’s look of recognition when his forehead, eyes, and nose had shown him to be himself; her blank surprise when his close-shaven lip and chin had proclaimed him Chilcote.

He felt like a man who has looked into an abyss and stepped back from the edge, outwardly calm but mentally shaken.  The commonplaces of life seemed for the moment to hold deeper meanings.  He did not hear Eve’s answer, he paid no heed to Lillian’s next remark.  He saw her smile and turn to the red-haired man; finally he saw her move on into the supper-room, followed by her little court.  Then he pressed the arm he was still holding.  He felt an urgent need of companionship—­of a human expression to the crisis he had passed.

“Shall we get out of this?” he asked again.

Eve looked up.  “Out of the room?” she said.

He looked down at her, compelling her gaze.  “Out of the room —­and the house,” he answered.  “Let us go-home.”

XVII

The necessary formalities of departure were speedily got through.  The passing of the corridors, the gaining of the carriage, seemed to Loder to be marvellously simple proceedings.  Then, as he sat by Eve’s side and again felt the forward movement of the horses, he had leisure for the first time to wonder whether the time that had passed since last he occupied that position had actually been lived through.

Only that night he had unconsciously compared one incident in his life to a sketch in which the lights and shadows have been obliterated and lost.  Now that picture rose before him, startlingly and incredibly intact.  He saw the sunlit houses of Santasalare, backgrounded by the sunlit hills—­saw them as plainly as when he himself had sketched them on his memory.  Every detail of the scene remained the same, even to the central figure; only the eye and the hand of the artist had changed.

At this point Eve broke in upon his thoughts.  Her first words were curiously coincidental.

“What did you think of Lillian Astrupp to-night?” she asked.  “Wasn’t her gown perfect?”

Loder lifted his head with an almost guilty start.  Then he answered straight from his thoughts.

“I—­I didn’t notice it,” he said; “but her eyes reminded me of a cat’s eyes—­and she walks like a cat.  I never seemed to see it—­until to-night.”