“Yes, he will have decided now,” said Stella to herself; and a certain calm fell upon her troubled soul.  Whatever was to be was now determined.  She went back to the tea-table and waited.

Henry Thresk had not much of the romantic in his character.  He was a busy man making the best and the most of the rewards which the years brought to him, and slamming the door each day upon the day which had gone before.  He made his life in the intellectual exercise of his profession and his membership of the House of Commons.  Upon the deeps of the emotions he had closed a lid.  Yet he had set out with a vague reluctance to Little Beeding; and once his motor-car had passed Hindhead and dipped to the weald of Sussex the reluctance had grown to a definite regret that he should once more have come into this country.  His recollections were of a dim far-off time, so dim that he could hardly believe that he had any very close relation with the young struggling man who had spent his first real holiday there.  But the young man had been himself and he had missed his opportunity high up on the downs by Arundel.  Words which Jane Repton had spoken to him in Bombay came back to him on this summer afternoon like a refrain to the steady hum of his car.  “You can get what you want, so long as you want it enough, but you cannot control the price you will have to pay.”

He had reached Little Beeding only a few moments before Dick and Stella had crossed into the garden.  He had been led by Hubbard into the library, where Mr. Hazlewood was sitting.  From the windows he had even seen the thatched cottage where Stella Ballantyne dwelt and its tiny garden bright with flowers.

“It is most kind of you to come,” Mr. Hazlewood had said.  “Ever since we had our little correspondence I have been anxious to take your opinion on my collection.  Though how in the world you manage to find time to have an opinion at all upon the subject is most perplexing.  I never open the Times but I see your name figuring in some important case.”

“And I, Mr. Hazlewood,” Thresk replied with a smile, “never open my mail without receiving a pamphlet from you.  I am not the only active man in the world.”

Even at that moment Mr. Hazlewood flushed with pleasure at the flattery.

“Little reflections,” he cried with a modest deprecation, “worked out more or less to completeness—­may I say that?—­in the quiet of a rural life, sparks from the tiny flame of my midnight oil.”  He picked up one pamphlet from a stack by his writing-table.  “You might perhaps care to look at The Prison Walls.”

Thresk drew back.

“I have got mine, Mr. Hazlewood,” he said firmly.  “Every man in England should have one.  No man in England has a right to two.”

Mr. Hazlewood fairly twittered with satisfaction.  Here was a notable man from the outside world of affairs who knew his work and held it in esteem.  Obviously then he was right to take these few disagreeable twists and turns which would ensure to him a mind free to pursue his labours.  He looked down at the pamphlet however, and his satisfaction was a trifle impaired.