And George moved from one to another till he came to the last.  It was himself.  He was represented in very perfectly cut clothes, with slightly crooked elbows, and race-glasses slung across him.  His head, disproportionately large, was surmounted by a black billycock hat with a very flat brim.  The artist had thought long and carefully over the face.  The lips and cheeks and chin were moulded so as to convey a feeling of the unimaginative joy of life, but to their shape and complexion was imparted a suggestion of obstinacy and choler.  To the eyes was given a glazed look, and between them set a little line, as though their owner were thinking: 

‘Hard work, hard work!  Noblesse oblige.  I must keep it going!’

Underneath was written:  “The Ambler.”

George stood long looking at the apotheosis of his fame.  His star was high in the heavens.  With the eye of his mind he saw a long procession of turf triumphs, a long vista of days and nights, and in them, round them, of them—­Helen Bellow; and by an odd coincidence, as he stood there, the artist’s glazed look came over his eyes, the little line sprang up between them.

He turned at the sound of voices and sank into a chair.  To have been caught thus gazing at himself would have jarred on his sense of what was right.

It was twenty minutes past seven, when, in evening dress, he left the club, and took a shilling’s-worth to Buckingham Gate.  Here he dismissed his cab, and turned up the large fur collar of his coat.  Between the brim of his opera-hat and the edge of that collar nothing but his eyes were visible.  He waited, compressing his lips, scrutinising each hansom that went by.  In the soft glow of one coming fast he saw a hand raised to the trap.  The cab stopped; George stepped out of the shadow and got in.  The cab went on, and Mrs. Bellew’s arm was pressed against his own.

It was their simple formula for arriving at a restaurant together.

In the third of several little rooms, where the lights were shaded, they sat down at a table in a corner, facing each a wall, and, underneath, her shoe stole out along the floor and touched his patent leather boot.  In their eyes, for all their would-be wariness, a light smouldered which would not be put out.  An habitue, sipping claret at a table across the little room, watched them in a mirror, and there came into his old heart a glow of warmth, half ache, half sympathy; a smile of understanding stirred the crow’s-feet round his eyes.  Its sweetness ebbed, and left a little grin about his shaven lips.  Behind the archway in the neighbouring room two waiters met, and in their nods and glances was that same unconscious sympathy, the same conscious grin.  And the old habitue thought: 

’How long will it last?’....  “Waiter, some coffee and my bill!”

He had meant to go to the play, but he lingered instead to look at Mrs. Bellew’s white shoulders and bright eyes in the kindly mirror.  And he thought: