during the whole of Sunday to finish it; and it was efficient, skilful, as good as it could be.  It had filled her life for nearly two days—­and he had not even mentioned it to her!  In the ruthless egotism of the ambitious man he had forgotten it, and forgotten to imagine sympathetically the contents of her mind.  Sharp remorse overcame him; she grew noble and pathetic in his eyes....  Contrast her modest and talented industry with the exacting, supercilious, incapable idleness of a Lois!

“That design of yours is jolly good,” he said shortly without any introductory phrases.

She perceptibly started.

“Oh!  George!  I’m so glad you think so.  I was afraid.  You know it was horribly difficult—­they give you no chance.”

“I know.  I know.  You’ve come out of it fine.”

She was in heaven; he also, because it was so easy for him to put her there.  He glanced backwards a few hours into the past, and he simply could not comprehend how it was that he had been so upset by the grotesque scene with Mr. Haim in the basement of No. 8.  Everything was all right; everything was utterly for the best.

CHAPTER VI

THE DINNER

I

Early on the morning of a Tuesday in the second half of June 1903, George Cannon was moving fast on a motor-bicycle westwards down the slope of Piccadilly.  At any rate he had the sensation of earliness, and was indeed thereby quite invigorated; it almost served instead of the breakfast which he had not yet taken.  But thousands of people travelling in the opposite direction in horse-omnibuses and in a few motor-buses seemed to regard the fact of their being abroad at that hour as dully normal.  They had fought, men and girls, for places in the crammed vehicles; they had travelled from far lands such as Putney; they had been up for hours, and the morning, which was so new to George, had lost its freshness for them; they were well used to the lustrous summer glories of the Green Park; what they chiefly beheld in the Green Park was the endless lines of wayfarers, radiating from Victoria along the various avenues, on the way, like themselves, to offices, ware-houses, and shops.  Of the stablemen, bus-washers, drivers, mechanics, chauffeurs, and conductors, who had left their beds much in advance even of the travellers, let us not speak—­even they had begun the day later than their wives, mothers, or daughters.  All this flying population, urged and preoccupied by pitiless time, gazed down upon George and saw a gay young swell without a care in the world rushing on ’one of those motor-bikes’ to freedom.