The sensation communicated to him by her hand when he had drawn off her glove in the tremendous silence of the hansom!  Marvellous, exquisite, magical sensation that no words of his could render!  And there had been others as rare.  These scenes were love; they were Marguerite; they were what he had lost....  Strange, that he should throw the ring into the river!  Nevertheless it was a right gesture.  She deserved it.  She was absolutely wrong; he was absolutely right—­she had admitted it.  Towards him she had no excuse.  Logically her attitude was absurd.  Yet no argument would change it.  Stupid—­that was what she was!  Stupid!  And ruthless!  She would be capable of martyrizing the whole world to her sense of duty, her damnable, insane sense of duty....  She was gone.  He was ruined; she had ruined him.  But he respected her.  He hated to respect her, but he respected her.

A thought leapt up in his mind—­and who could have guessed it?  It was the thought that the secrecy of the engagement would save him from a great deal of public humiliation.  He would have loathed saying:  “We’ve broken it off.”

CHAPTER VIII

INSPIRATION

I

George, despite his own dispositions, as he went up in the lift, to obviate the danger of such a mishap, was put out of countenance by the overwhelming splendour of Miss Irene Wheeler’s flat.  And he did not quite recover his aplomb until the dinner was nearly finished.  The rooms were very large and lofty; they blazed with electric light, though the day had not yet gone; they gleamed with the polish of furniture, enamel, bookbindings, marble, ivory, and precious metals; they were ennobled by magnificent pictures, and purified by immense quantities of lovely flowers.  George had made the mistake of arriving last.  He found in the vast drawing-room five people who had the air of being at home and intimate together.  There were, in addition to the hostess, Lois and Laurencine Ingram, Everard Lucas, and a Frenchman from the French Embassy whose name he did not catch.  Miss Wheeler wore an elaborate Oriental costume, and apologized for its simplicity on the grounds that she was fatigued by a crowded and tiresome reception which she had held that afternoon, and that the dinner was to be without ceremony.  This said, her conversation seemed to fail, but she remained by George’s side, apart from the others.  George saw not the least vestige of the ruinous disorder which, in the society to which he was accustomed, usually accompanied a big afternoon tea, or any sign of a lack of ceremony.  He had encountered two male servants in the hall, and had also glimpsed a mulatto woman in a black dress and a white apron, and a Frenchwoman in a black dress and a black apron.  Now a third man-servant entered, bearing an enormous silver-gilt tray on which were multitudinous bottles, glasses, decanters, and jugs.