To-night, as he drew, he was thinking incessantly of Eugenie; pierced often by intolerable remorse.  But whose fault was it?  Will you ask a man, perishing of need, to put its satisfaction from him?  The tests of life are too hard.  The plain, selfish man must always fail under them.  Why act and speak as though he were responsible for what Nature and the flesh impose?

But how was it all to end?—­that was what tormented him.  His conscience shrank from the half-perceived villainies before him; but his will failed him.  What was the use of talking?  He was the slave of an impulse, which was not passion, which had none of the excuse of passion, but represented rather the blind search of a man who, like a child in the dark, recoils in reckless terror from loneliness and the phantoms of his own mind.

Eleven o’clock struck.  He was busying himself with a cardboard model, on which he had been trying the effect of certain arrangements, when he heard a knock at his door.

‘Entrez!’ he said, in astonishment.

At this season of the year the hotel kept early hours, and there was not a light to be seen in the cour.

The door opened.  On the threshold stood Arthur Welby.  Fenwick gazed at him open-mouthed.

‘You?—­you came to see me?’

He advanced, head foremost, hand outstretched.

‘I have something important to say to you.’  Welby took no notice of the hand.  ‘Shall we be undisturbed?’

‘I imagine so!’ said Fenwick, fiercely retreating; ’but, as you see, I am extremely busy!’ He pointed to the room and its contents.

’I am sorry to interrupt you’—­Welby’s voice was carefully controlled—­’but I think you will admit that I had good reason to come and find you.’  He looked round to see that the door was shut, then advanced a step nearer.  ‘You are, I think, acquainted with that lady?’

He handed Fenwick a card.  Fenwick took it to the light.  On it was lithographed ‘Miss Isabel Morrison,’ and a written address, ’Corso de Madrid, Buenos Ayres,’ had been lightly scratched out in one corner.

Fenwick put down the card.

‘Well,’ he said, sharply—­’and if I am—­what then?’

Welby began to speak—­paused—­and cleared his throat.  He was standing, with one hand lightly resting on the table, his eyes fixed on Fenwick.  There was a moment of shock, of mutual defiance.

‘This lady seems to have observed the movements of our party here,’ said Welby, commanding himself.  ’She followed my wife and me to-day, after we met you in the Park.  She spoke to us.  She gave us the astonishing news that you were a married man—­that your wife—­’

Fenwick rushed forward and gripped the speaker’s arm.

‘My God!  Tell me!—­is she alive?’

His eyes starting out of his head—­his crimson face—­his anguish, seemed to affect the other with indescribable repulsion.

Welby wrenched himself free.