Then the door opened and Mr. Enwright appeared.  Simultaneously some shillings slipped out of George’s pocket and rolled about the floor.  The hour was Mr. Enwright’s customary hour of arrival, but he had no fair excuse for passing through that room instead of proceeding along the corridor direct to the principals’ room.  His aspect, as he gazed at George’s hair and at the revealed sateen back of George’s waistcoat, was unusual.  Mr. Enwright commonly entered the office full of an intense and aggrieved consciousness of his own existence—­of his insomnia, of the reaction upon himself of some client’s stupidity, of the necessity of going out again in order to have his chin lacerated by his favourite and hated Albanian barber.  But now he had actually forgotten himself.

“What is this?” he demanded.

Lucas having quickly restored the box, George subsided dangerously thereon, and arose in a condition much disarrayed and confused, and beheld Mr. Enwright with shame.

“I—­I was just looking to see if the trap of the chimney was shut,” said George.  It was foolish in the extreme, but it was the best he could do, and after all it was a rather marvellous invention.  Lucas sat down and made no remark.

“You might respect the mantelpiece,” said Mr. Enwright bitterly, and went into the principals’ room, where John Orgreave could be heard dictating letters.  George straightened his clothes and picked up his money, and the two men of the world giggled nervously at each other.

Mr. Haim next disturbed them.  The shabby, respectable old man smiled vaguely, with averted glance.

“I think he’s heard the result,” said he.

Both men knew that ‘he’ was Mr. Enwright, and that the ‘result’ was the result of the open competition for the L150,000 Law Courts which a proud provincial city proposed to erect for itself.  The whole office had worked very hard on the drawings for that competition throughout the summer, while cursing the corporation which had chosen so unusual a date for sending-in day.  Even Lucas had worked.  George’s ideas for certain details, upon which he had been engaged on the evening of his introduction to Mr. Haim’s household, had been accepted by Mr. Enwright.  As for Mr. Enwright, though the exigencies of his beard, and his regular morning habit of inveighing against the profession at great length, and his inability to decide where he should lunch, generally prevented him from beginning the day until three o’clock in the afternoon, Mr. Enwright had given many highly concentrated hours of creative energy to the design.  And Mr. Haim had adorned the sheets with the finest lettering.  The design was held to be very good.  The principals knew the identity of all the other chief competitors and their powers, and they knew also the idiosyncrasies of the Assessor; and their expert and impartial opinion was that the Lucas & Enwright design ought to win and would win.  This view, indeed, was widespread in the arcana of the architectural world.  George had gradually grown certain of victory.  And yet, at Mr. Haim’s words, his hopes sank horribly away.