Luck, of course; but luck deserved!  He could marry this unique creature and be idolized and cherished for the rest of his life.  In an instant, from being a scorner of conjugal domesticity, he became a scorner of the bachelor’s existence, with its immeasurable secret ennui hidden beneath the jaunty cloak of a specious freedom—­freedom to be bored, freedom to fret, and long and envy, freedom to eat ashes and masticate dust!  He would marry her.  Yes, he was saved, because he was loved.  And he meant to be worthy of his regenerate destiny.  All the best part of his character came to the surface and showed in his face.  But he did not ask his heart whether he was or was not in love with Rachel.  The point did not present itself.  He certainly never doubted that he was seeing her with a quite normal vision.

Their talk went through and through the enormous topic of the night and day, arriving at no conclusion whatever, except that there was no conclusion—­not even a theory of a conclusion. (And the Louis who now discussed the case was an innocent, reborn Louis, quite unconnected with the Louis of the previous evening; he knew no more of the inwardness of the affair than Rachel did.  Of such singular feats of doubling the personality is the self-deceiving mind capable.) After a time it became implicit in the tone of their conversation that the mysterious disappearance in a small, ordinary house of even so colossal a sum as nine hundred and sixty-five pounds did not mean the end of the world.  That is to say, they grew accustomed to the situation.  Louis, indeed, permitted himself to suggest, as a man of the large, still-existing world, that Rachel should guard against over-estimating the importance of the sum.  True, as he had several times reflected, it did represent an income of about a pound a week!  But, after all, what was a pound a week, viewed in a proper perspective?...

Louis somehow glided from the enormous topic to the topic of the newest cinema—­Rachel had never seen a cinema, except a very primitive one, years earlier—­and old Batchgrew was mentioned, he being notoriously a cinema magnate.  “I cannot stand that man,” said Rachel with a candour that showed to what intimacy their talk had developed.  Louis was delighted by the explosion, and they both fell violently upon Thomas Batchgrew and found intense pleasure in destroying him.  And Louis was saying to himself, enthusiastically, “How well she understands human nature!”

So that when old Batchgrew, without any warning or preliminary sound, stalked pompously into the room their young confusion was excessive.  They felt themselves suddenly in the presence of not merely a personal adversary, but of an enemy of youth and of love and of joy—­of a being mysterious and malevolent who neither would nor could comprehend them.  And they were at once resentful and intimidated.

During the morning Councillor Batchgrew had provided himself—­doubtless by purchase, since he had not been home—­with a dandiacal spotted white waistcoat in honour of the warm and sunny weather.  This waistcoat by its sprightly unsuitability to his aged uncouthness, somehow intensified the sinister quality of his appearance.