“You might remind your husband,” he said, “that I’d rather like to have a card to the Orchil affair.”

“There is no use in speaking to George,” she replied regretfully, shaking her head.

“Try it,” returned Neergard with the hint of a snarl; and he took his leave, and his hat from the man in waiting, who looked after him with the slightest twitching of his shaven upper lip.  For the lifting of an eyebrow in the drawing-rooms becomes warrant for a tip that runs very swiftly below stairs.

That afternoon, alone in his office, Neergard remembered Gerald.  And for the first time he understood the mistake of making an enemy out of what he had known only as a friendly fool.

But it was a detail, after all—­merely a slight error in assuming too early an arrogance he could have afforded to wait for.  He had waited a long, long while for some things.

As for Fane, he had him locked up with his short account.  No doubt he’d hear from the Orchils through the Fanes.  However, to clinch the matter, he thought he might as well stop in to see Ruthven.  A plain word or two to Ruthven indicating his own wishes—­perhaps outlining his policy concerning the future house of Neergard—­might as well be delivered now as later.

So that afternoon he took a hansom at Broad and Wall streets and rolled smoothly uptown, not seriously concerned, but willing to have a brief understanding with Ruthven on one or two subjects.

As his cab drove up to the intricately ornamental little house of gray stone, a big touring limousine wheeled out from the curb, and he caught sight of Sanxon Orchil and Phoenix Mottly inside, evidently just leaving Ruthven.

His smiling and very cordial bow was returned coolly by Orchil, and apparently not observed at all by Mottly.  He sat a second in his cab, motionless, the obsequious smile still stencilled on his flushed face; then the flush darkened; he got out of his cab and, bidding the man wait, rang at the house of Ruthven.

Admitted, it was a long while before he was asked to mount the carved stairway of stone.  And when he did, on every step, hand on the bronze rail, he had the same curious sense of occult resistance to his physical progress; the same instinct of a new element arising into the scheme of things the properties of which he felt a sudden fierce desire to test and comprehend.

Ruthven in a lounging suit of lilac silk, sashed in with flexible silver, stood with his back to the door as Neergard was announced; and even after he was announced Ruthven took his time to turn and stare and nod with a deliberate negligence that accented the affront.

Neergard sat down; Ruthven gazed out of the window, then, soft thumbs hooked in his sash, turned leisurely in impudent interrogation.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” asked Neergard, for the subtle something he had been encountering all day had suddenly seemed to wall him out of all he had conquered, forcing him back into the simpler sordid territory where ways and modes of speech were more familiar to him—­where the spontaneous crudity of expression belonged among the husks of all he had supposed discarded for ever.