“Have seen the lady, also Mrs. Hurd.  You are urgently asked to undertake defence.”

He spread it out before him now, and pondered it.  The bit of flimsy paper contained for him the promise of all he most coveted,—­influence, emotion, excitement.  “She will have returns upon herself,” he thought smiling, “when I see her again.  She will be dignified, resentful; she will suspect everything I say or do—­still more, she will suspect herself.  No matter!  The situation is in my hands.  Whether I succeed or fail, she will be forced to work with me, to consult with me—­she will owe me gratitude.  What made her consent?—­she must have felt it in some sort a humiliation.  Is it that Raeburn has been driving her to strong measures—­that she wants, woman-like, to win, and thought me after all her best chance, and put her pride in her pocket?  Or is it?—­ah! one should put that out of one’s head.  It’s like wine—­it unsteadies one.  And for a thing like this one must go into training.  Shall I write to her—­there is just time now, before I start—­take the lofty tone, the equal masculine tone, which I have noticed she likes?—­ask her pardon for an act of madness—­before we go together to the rescue of a life?  It might do—­it might go down.  But no, I think not!  Let the situation develop itself.  Action and reaction—­the unexpected—­I commit myself to that. She—­marry Aldous Raeburn in a month?  Well, she may—­certainly she may.  But there is no need for me, I think, to take it greatly into account.  Curious! twenty-four hours ago I thought it all done with—­dead and done with.  ‘So like Provvy,’ as Bentham used to say, when he heard of anything particularly unseemly in the way of natural catastrophe.  Now to dine, and be off!  How little sleep can I do with in the next fortnight?”

He rang, ordered his cab, and then went to the coffee-room for some hasty food.  As he was passing one of the small tables with which the room was filled, a man who was dining there with a friend recognised him and gave him a cold nod.  Wharton walked on to the further end of the room, and, while waiting for his meal, buried himself in the local evening paper, which already contained a report of his speech.

“Did you see that man?” asked the stranger of his friend.

“The small young fellow with the curly hair?”

“Small young fellow, indeed!  He is the wiriest athlete I know—­extraordinary physical strength for his size—­and one of the cleverest rascals out as a politician.  I am a neighbour of his in the country.  His property joins mine.  I knew his father—­a little, dried-up old chap of the old school—­very elegant manners and very obstinate—­worried to death by his wife—­oh, my goodness! such a woman!”

“What’s the name?” said the friend, interrupting.