“What are we waiting for?” he asked, good humoredly, addressing the back of the stranger’s head.

The man turned, displaying a genial face, a red mustache, and an eye-glass.

“Hullo, Chilcote!” he said.  “Hope it’s not on your feet I’m standing.”

Loder laughed.  “No,” he said.  “And don’t change the position.  If you were an inch higher I should be blind as well as crippled.”

The other laughed.  It was a pleasant surprise to find Chilcote amiable under discomfort.  He looked round again in slight curiosity.

Loder felt the scrutiny.  To create a diversion he looked out along the corridor.  “I believe we are waiting for something,” he exclaimed.  “What’s this?” Then quite abruptly be ceased to speak.

“Anything interesting?” Eve touched his arm.

He said nothing; he made no effort to look round.  His thought as well as his speech was suddenly suspended.

The man in front of him let his eye-glass fall from his eye, then screwed it in again.

“Jove!” he exclaimed.  “Here comes our sorceress.  It’s like the progress of a fairy princess.  I believe this is the meaning of our getting penned in here,” he chuckled delightedly.

Loder said nothing.  He stared straight on over the other’s head.

Along the corridor, agreeably conscious of the hum of admiration she aroused, came Lillian Astrupp, surrounded by a little court.  Her delicate face was lit up; her eyes shone under the faint gleam of her hair; her gown of gold embroidery swept round her gracefully.  She was radiant and triumphant, but she was also excited.  The excitement was evident in her laugh, in her gestures, in her eyes, as they turned quickly in one direction and then another.

Loder, gazing in stupefaction over the other man’s head, saw it—­felt and understood it with a mind that leaped back over a space of years.  As in a shifting panorama he saw a night of disturbance and confusion in a far-off Italian valley—­a confusion from which one face shone out with something of the pale, alluring radiance that filtered over the hillside from the crescent moon.  It passed across his consciousness slowly but with a slow completeness; and in its light the incidents of the past hour stood out in a new aspect.  The echo of recollection stirred by Lady Bramfell’s voice, the re-echo of it in the sister’s tones; his own blindness, his own egregious assurance—­all struck across his mind.

Meanwhile the party about Lillian drew nearer.  He felt with instinctive certainty that the supper-room was its destination, but he remained motionless, held by a species of fatalism.  He watched her draw near with an unmoved face, but in the brief space that passed while she traversed the corridor he gauged to the full the hold that the new atmosphere, the new existence, had gained over his mind.  With an unlooked-for rush of feeling he realized how dearly he would part with it.