“If you’d drop that play-acting talk and speak like a man, I’d like you better,” Sylvanus Power continued.  “There it is in plain words.  I lived with my wife until we quarrelled and she left me, and while she lived with me I thought no more of women than cats.  When she went, I thought I’d done with the sex.  Elizabeth Dalstan happened along, and I found I hadn’t even begun.  Eight years ago we met.  I offered her at once everything I could offer.  Nothing doing.  We don’t need to tell one another that she isn’t that sort.  I went off and left her, spent a winter in Siberia, and came home by China.  I suppose there were women there and in Paris.  I was there for a month.  I didn’t see them.  Then America.  Elizabeth Dalstan was still touring, not doing much good for herself.  I hung around for a time, tried my luck once more—­no go.  Then I went back to Europe, offered my wife ten million and an income for a divorce.  It didn’t suit her, so I came back again.  The third time I found Elizabeth discouraged.  If ever a man found a woman at the right time, I did.  She is ambitious—­Lord knows why!  I hate acting and the theatres and everything to do with them.  However, I tried a new move.  I built that theatre in New York—­there isn’t another place like it in the world—­and offered it to her for a birthday present.  Then she began to hesitate.”

“Look here,” Philip broke in, “I know all this.  I know everything you have told me, and everything you can tell me.  What about it?  What have you got to say to me?”

“This,” Sylvanus Power declared, striking the desk with his clenched fist.  “I have only had one consolation all the time I have been waiting—­there has been no other man.  Elizabeth isn’t that sort.  Each time I was separated and came back, I just looked at her and I knew.  That’s why I have been patient.  That is why I haven’t insisted upon my debt being paid.  You understand that?”

“I hear what you say.”

Power crossed the room, helped himself to whisky, and returned to his place with the tumbler in his hand.  There was a brief silence.  A little clock upon the mantelpiece struck two.  The street sounds outside had ceased save for the hoot of an occasional taxicab.  Philip was conscious of a burning desire to get away.  This man, this great lump of power and success, standing like a colossus in his wonderful home, infuriated him.  That a man should live who thought he had a right such as he claimed, was maddening.

“Well,” Power proceeded, setting down the tumbler empty, “you won’t be bought.  How am I going to get you out of the way?”

“You can’t do it,” Philip asserted.  “I am going to-morrow morning to Elizabeth, and I am going to pray her to marry me at once.”

Power swayed for a single moment upon his feet.  The teeth gleamed between his slightly parted lips.  His great arm was outstretched, its bursting muscles showing against the sleeve of his dinner coat.  His chest was heaving.