more of the look, or rather the entire absence of look wherewith Raeburn had walked past his greeting and his outstretched hand in a corridor of the House, on the first occasion of their meeting after the news had become public property, Wharton was inclined to think she had—­what then?  No doubt the stern moralist might have something to say on the subject of taking advantage of a guest’s position to tamper with another man’s betrothed.  If so, the stern moralist would only show his usual incapacity to grasp the actual facts of flesh and blood.  What chance would he or any one else have had with Marcella Boyce, if she had happened to be in love with the man she had promised to marry?  That little trifle had been left out in the arrangement.  It might have worked through perfectly well without; as it happened it had broken down. Realities had broken it down.  Small blame to them!

“I stood for truth!” he said to himself with a kind of rage—­“that moment when I held her in the library, she lived.—­Raeburn offered her a platform, a position; I made her think, and feel.  I helped her to know herself.  Our relation was not passion; it stood on the threshold—­but it was real—­a true relation so far as it went.  That it went no farther was due again to circumstances—­realities—­of another kind.  That he should scorn and resent my performance at Mellor is natural enough.  If we were in France he would call me out and I should give him satisfaction with all the pleasure in life.  But what am I about?  Are his ways mine?  I should have nothing left but to shoot myself to-morrow if they were!”

He walked on swiftly, angrily rating himself for those symptoms of a merely false and conventional conscience which were apt to be roused in him by contact with Aldous Raeburn.

“Has he not interfered with my freedom—­stamped his pedantic foot on me—­ever since we were boys together!  I have owed him one for many years—­now I have paid it.  Let him take the chances of war!”

Then, driven on by an irritation not to be quieted, he began against his will to think of those various occasions on which he and Aldous Raeburn had crossed each other in the past—­of that incident in particular which Miss Raeburn had roughly recalled to Lady Winterbourne’s reluctant memory.

Well, and what of it?  It had occurred when Wharton was a lad of twenty-one, and during an interval of some months when Aldous Raeburn, who had left Cambridge some three years before, and was already the man of importance, had shown a decided disposition to take up the brilliant, unmanageable boy, whom the Levens, among other relations, had already washed their hands of.

“What did he do it for?” thought Wharton.  “Philanthropic motives of course.  He is one of the men who must always be saving their souls, and the black sheep of the world come in handy for the purpose.  I remember I was flattered then.  It takes one some time to understand the workings of the Hebraistic conscience!”