Upon leaving the office, which was on the second floor, Tom met Ellis coming up the stairs.  It had several times of late occurred to Tom that Ellis had a sneaking fondness for Clara.  Panoplied in his own engagement, Tom had heretofore rather enjoyed the idea of a hopeless rival.  Ellis was such a solemn prig, and took life so seriously, that it was a pleasure to see him sit around sighing for the unattainable.  That he should be giving pain to Ellis added a certain zest to his own enjoyment.  But this interview with the major had so disquieted him that upon meeting Ellis upon the stairs he was struck by a sudden suspicion.  He knew that Major Carteret seldom went to the Clarendon Club, and that he must have got his information from some one else.  Ellis was a member of the club, and a frequent visitor.  Who more likely than he to try to poison Clara’s mind, or the minds of her friends, against her accepted lover?  Tom did not think that the world was using him well of late; bad luck had pursued him, in cards and other things, and despite his assumption of humility, Carteret’s lecture had left him in an ugly mood.  He nodded curtly to Ellis without relaxing the scowl that disfigured his handsome features.

“That’s the damned sneak who’s been giving me away,” he muttered.  “I’ll get even with him yet for this.”

Delamere’s suspicions with regard to Ellis’s feelings were not, as we have seen, entirely without foundation.  Indeed, he had underestimated the strength of this rivalry and its chances of success.  Ellis had been watching Delamere for a year.  There had been nothing surreptitious about it, but his interest in Clara had led him to note things about his favored rival which might have escaped the attention of others less concerned.

Ellis was an excellent judge of character, and had formed a very decided opinion of Tom Delamere.  To Ellis, unbiased by ancestral traditions, biased perhaps by jealousy, Tom Delamere was a type of the degenerate aristocrat.  If, as he had often heard, it took three or four generations to make a gentleman, and as many more to complete the curve and return to the base from which it started, Tom Delamere belonged somewhere on the downward slant, with large possibilities of further decline.  Old Mr. Delamere, who might be taken as the apex of an ideal aristocratic development, had been distinguished, during his active life, as Ellis had learned, for courage and strength of will, courtliness of bearing, deference to his superiors, of whom there had been few, courtesy to his equals, kindness and consideration for those less highly favored, and above all, a scrupulous sense of honor; his grandson Tom was merely the shadow without the substance, the empty husk without the grain.  Of grace he had plenty.  In manners he could be perfect, when he so chose.  Courage and strength he had none.  Ellis had seen this fellow, who boasted of his descent from a line of cavaliers, turn pale with fright and