“He has from this moment ceased to be my partner,” said Mr. Taynton brokenly.  “I could never again sign what he has signed, or work with him, or—­or—­except once—­see him again.  He is coming here by appointment at half-past nine.  Suppose that we all meet here.  We have both got to see him.”

Morris nodded and went toward the door.  A sudden spasm of anxiety seemed to seize Mr. Taynton.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“I don’t know.  Drive to Falmer Park perhaps, and tell Sir Richard you cannot see him immediately.  Will you see him to-morrow?”

“Yes, I will call to-morrow morning.  Morris, promise me you will do nothing rash, nothing that will bring sorrow on all those who love you.”

“I shall bring a little sorrow on a man who hates me,” said he.

He went out, and Mr. Taynton sat down again, his mouth compressed into hard lines, his forehead heavily frowning.  He could not permanently prevent Morris from meeting Godfrey Mills, besides, it was his right to do so, yet how fraught with awful risks to himself that meeting would be!  Morris might easily make a violent, even a murderous, assault on the man, but Mills was an expert boxer and wrestler, science would probably get the upper hand of blind rage.  But how deadly a weapon Mills had in store against himself; he would certainly tell Morris that if one partner had slandered him the other, whom he so trusted and revered, had robbed him; he would say, too, that Taynton had been cognizant of, and had approved, his slanders.  There was no end to the ruin that would certainly be brought about his head if they met.  Mills’s train, too, would have left London by now; there was no chance of stopping him.  Then there was another danger he had not foreseen, and it was too late to stop that now.  Morris was going again to Falmer Park, had indeed started, and that afternoon Godfrey Mills would get out of the train, as he had planned, at the station just below, and walk back over the downs to Brighton.  What if they met there, alone?

For an hour perhaps Mr. Taynton delved at these problems, and at the end even it did not seem as if he had solved them satisfactorily, for when he went out of his house, as he did at the end of this time to get a little breeze if such was obtainable, his face was still shadowed and overclouded.  Overclouded too was the sky, and as he stepped out into the street from his garden-room the hot air struck him like a buffet; and in his troubled and apprehensive mood it felt as if some hot hand warned him by a blow not to venture out of his house.  But the house, somehow, in the last hour had become terrible to him, any movement or action, even on a day like this, when only madmen and the English go abroad, was better than the nervous waiting in his darkened room.  Dreadful forces, forces of ruin and murder and disgrace, were abroad in the world of men; the menace of the low black clouds and stifling