“That,” said Wratislaw with emphasis, “is the needle-point of the whole business.  He has fallen in love with just the wrong sort of woman.  Very pretty, very good, a demure puritanical little Pharisee, clever enough, too, to see Lewie’s merits, too weak to hope to remedy them, and too full of prejudice to accept them.  There you have the makings of a very pretty tragedy.”

“I am so sorry,” said the lady.  She was touched by this man’s anxiety for his friend, and Mr. Lewis Haystoun, whom she was never likely to meet again, became a figure of interest in her eyes.  She turned to say something more, but Wratislaw, having unburdened his soul to some one, and feeling a little relieved, was watching his chief’s face further down the table.  That nobleman, hopelessly ill at ease, had given up the pretence of amiability and was now making frantic endeavours to send mute signals across the flowers to his under secretary.

The Montrayner guests seldom linger.  Within half an hour after the ladies left the table Beauregard and Wratislaw were taking leave and hurrying into their greatcoats.

“You are going down to the House,” said the elder man, “and I’ll come too.  I want to have some talk with you.  I tried to catch your eye at dinner to get you to come round and deliver me from old Montrayner, for I had to sit on his right hand and couldn’t come round to you.  Heigho-ho!  I wish I was a Trappist.”

The cab had turned out of Piccadilly into St. James’s Street before either man spoke again.  The tossing lights of a windy autumn evening were shimmering on the wet pavement, and faces looked spectral white in the morris-dance of shine and shadow.  Wratislaw, whose soul was sick for high, clean winds and the great spaces of the moors, was thinking of Glenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north.  His companion was furrowing his brow over some knotty problem in his duties.

In Pall Mall there was a lull in the noise, but neither seemed disposed to talk.

“We had better wait till we get to the House,” said Beauregard.  “We must have peace, for I have got the most vexatious business to speak about.”  And again he wrinkled his anxious brows and stared in front of him.

They entered a private room where the fire had burned itself out, and the lights fell on heavy furniture and cheerless solitude.  Beauregard spread himself out in an arm-chair, and stared at the ceiling.  Wratislaw, knowing his chief’s manners, stood before the blackened grate and waited.

“Fetch me an atlas—­that big one, and find the map of the Indian frontier.”  Wratislaw obeyed and stretched the huge folio on the table.

The elder man ran his forefinger in a circle.

“There—­that wretched radius is the plague of my life.  Our reports stop short at that line, and reliable information begins again some hundreds of miles north.  Meanwhile—­between?” And he shrugged his shoulders.