talking of the Driscoll campaign, and he became recklessly explicit.  He seemed to have nothing to hold back:  all the details of the prodigious exploit poured from him with Homeric volume.  Then he broke off abruptly, thrusting his hands into his trouser-pockets and shaping his red lips to a whistle which he checked as his glance met Undine’s.  To conceal his embarrassment he leaned back in his chair, looked about the table with complacency, and said “I don’t mind if I do” to the servant who approached to re-fill his champagne glass.

The men sat long over their cigars; but after an interval Undine called Charles Bowen into the drawing-room to settle some question in dispute between Clare and Mrs. Fairford, and thus gave Moffatt a chance to be alone with her husband.  Now that their guests had gone she was throbbing with anxiety to know what had passed between the two; but when Ralph rejoined her in the drawing-room she continued to keep her eyes on the fire and twirl her fan listlessly.

“That’s an amazing chap,” Ralph repeated, looking down at her.  “Where was it you ran across him—­out at Apex?”

As he leaned against the chimney-piece, lighting his cigarette, it struck Undine that he looked less fagged and lifeless than usual, and she felt more and more sure that something important had happened during the moment of isolation she had contrived.

She opened and shut her fan reflectively.  “Yes—­years ago; father had some business with him and brought him home to dinner one day.”

“And you’ve never seen him since?”

She waited, as if trying to piece her recollections together.  “I suppose I must have; but all that seems so long ago,” she said sighing.  She had been given, of late, to such plaintive glances toward her happy girlhood but Ralph seemed not to notice the allusion.

“Do you know,” he exclaimed after a moment, “I don’t believe the fellow’s beaten yet.”

She looked up quickly.  “Don’t you?”

“No; and I could see that Bowen didn’t either.  He strikes me as the kind of man who develops slowly, needs a big field, and perhaps makes some big mistakes, but gets where he wants to in the end.  Jove, I wish I could put him in a book!  There’s something epic about him—­a kind of epic effrontery.”

Undine’s pulses beat faster as she listened.  Was it not what Moffatt had always said of himself—­that all he needed was time and elbow-room?  How odd that Ralph, who seemed so dreamy and unobservant, should instantly have reached the same conclusion!  But what she wanted to know was the practical result of their meeting.

“What did you and he talk about when you were smoking?”

“Oh, he got on the Driscoll fight again—­gave us some extraordinary details.  The man’s a thundering brute, but he’s full of observation and humour.  Then, after Bowen joined you, he told me about a new deal he’s gone into—­rather a promising scheme, but on the same Titanic scale.  It’s just possible, by the way, that we may be able to do something for him:  part of the property he’s after is held in our office.”  He paused, knowing Undine’s indifference to business matters; but the face she turned to him was alive with interest.