After dinner James hurried to his lair to search for a book.  The book was not where he had left it, on his original entry into Wilbraham Hall.  Within two minutes, the majority of the household staff was engaged in finding that book.  Ultimately the butler discovered it; the butler had been reading it.

“Ay!” said James, opening the volume as he stood in front of the rich, expensive fire in the hall.  “Dickens—­Charles Dickens—­that’s the chap’s name.  I couldn’t think of it when I was telling you about th’ book th’ other day.  I mun’ go on wi” that.”

“Couldn’t you play us something?” responded his wife.

In the triumph of concertinas over grand pianos, poor Emanuel, lying wounded upstairs, was forgotten.  At five minutes to nine Helen stole, unperceived, away from the domestic tableau.  She had by no means recovered from her amazement; but she had screened it off by main force in her mind, and she was now occupied with something far more important than the blameless amours of the richest old man in Hillport.

By Wilbraham Water a young man was walking to and fro in the deep autumn night.  He wore a cap and a muffler, but no overcoat, and his hands were pushed far down into the pockets of his trousers.  He regarded the ground fixedly, and stamped his feet at every step.  Then a pale grey figure, with head enveloped in a shawl, and skirts carefully withdrawn from the ground, approached him.

He did not salute the figure, he did not even take his hands out of his pockets.  He put his face close to hers, and each could see that the other’s features were white and anxious.

“So you’ve come,” said he, glumly.

“What do you want?” Helen coldly asked.

“I want to speak to you.  That’s what I want.  If you care for Emanuel Prockter, why did you play that trick on him this afternoon?”

“What trick?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean.  So I’ll thank you not to beat about the bush.  The plain fact is that you don’t care a pin for Prockter.”

“I never said I did.”

“You’ve made every one believe you did, anyhow.  You’ve even made me think so, though all the time I knew it was impossible.  An ass like that!”

“What do you want?” Helen repeated.

They were both using a tone intended to indicate that they were enemies from everlasting to everlasting, and that mere words could not express the intensity of their mutual hatred and scorn.  The casual distant observer might have conceived the encounter to be a love idyll.

There was a short silence.

“I broke off my engagement last night,” Andrew Dean muttered, ferociously.

“Really!” Helen commented.

“You don’t seem to care.”

“I don’t see what it has to do with me.  But if you talked to Lilian Swetnam in the same nice agreeable manner that you talk to me, I can’t say I’m surprised to hear that she broke with you.”