Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby’s return.  He was searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful.  They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him.  As many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of passionate rebellion.

Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field of the Lust of Mastery?  Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash, it dawned upon him that this was his awakening.  Something of himself she had shown him in the former time:  how he was rusting inactive in the small field when he should be doing a man’s work, the work for which his training had fitted him, in the larger.  But the glamour of sentiment had been over it all in those days, and to the passion-warped the high call is transmitted in terms of self-seeking.

He turned upon her suddenly.

“Did you mean to reproach me?” he asked abruptly.

“How absurd!”

“No, it isn’t.  You are responsible for me, in a certain sense.  You sent me out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you.”

“‘But what went ye out for to see?’” she quoted softly.

“I know,” he nodded, sitting down again.  “You thought you were arousing a worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened.  I’ve been trying to be a money-getter.”

“You can be something vastly better.”

“No, I am afraid not; it is too late.”

Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable.  He believed now what he had been slow to credit before:  that he had it in him to hew his way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call out all the reserves of battle-might and courage.  That motive she alone, of all the women in the world, might have supplied, he told himself in keen self-pity.  With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire him....  He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside.  There would be time enough to drain it farther on.

“Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis,” he said, breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; “Ormsby and I——­”

She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.

“I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not,” she confessed.  “Mother will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always do.”

David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon summer for a background.