’Then you won’t tell me?  Very well.  I chuck up the job.  You can run the show yourself.’

Alma had never looked for delicacy in Felix Dymes, and his motives had from the first been legible to her, but this revelation of brutality went beyond anything for which she was prepared.  As she saw the man move away, a feeling of helplessness and of dread overcame her anger.  She could not do without him.  The only other man active on her behalf was Cyrus Redgrave, and to seek Redgrave’s help at such a juncture, with the explanation that must necessarily be given, would mean abandonment of her last scruple.  Of course, the paragraph in the West End originated with him; since Dymes knew nothing about it, it could have no other source.  Slowly, but very completely, the man of wealth and social influence had drawn his nets about her; at each meeting with him she felt more perilously compromised; her airs of command served merely to disguise defeat in the contest she had recklessly challenged.  Thrown upon herself, she feared Redgrave, shrank from the thought of seeing him.  Not that he had touched her heart or beguiled her senses; she hated him for his success in the calculated scheme to which she had consciously yielded step by step; but she was brought to the point of regarding him as inseparable from her ambitious hopes.  Till quite recently her thought had been that, after using him to secure a successful debut, she could wave him off, perhaps tell him in plain words, with a smile of scorn, that they were quits.  She now distrusted her power to stand alone.  To the hostility of such a man as Dymes —­ certain, save at intolerable cost —­ she must be able to oppose a higher influence.  Between Dymes and Redgrave there was no hesitating on whatever score.  This advertisement in the fashionable and authoritative weekly paper surpassed Dymes’s scope; his savage jealousy was sufficient proof of that.  All she could do for the moment was to temporise with her ignobler master, and the humiliation of such a necessity seemed to poison her blood.

She rose, talked a little of she knew not what with she knew not whom, and moved towards the hostess, by whom her enemy was sitting.  A glance sufficed.  As soon as she had taken leave, Dymes followed her.  He came up to her side at a few yards from the house, and they walked together, without speaking, until Alma turned into the first quiet street.

‘I give you my word,’ she began, ’that I know nothing whatever about that paper.’

‘I believe you, and I’m sorry I made a row,’ Dymes replied.  ’There’s no harm done.  I dare say I shall be hearing more about it.’

‘I have some photographs here,’ said Alma, touching her sealskin bag.  ‘Will you take them?’

’Thanks.  But there’s a whole lot of things to be arranged.  We can’t talk here.  Let’s go to my rooms.’

He spoke as though nothing were more natural.  Alma, the blood throbbing at her temples, saw him beckon a crawling hansom.