‘So you are glad to get back to London,’ she said.

‘Rather.  I feel at home here, and only here—­even in January.’  He looked across the Park with a laugh.  It stretched away vacant and dull in the gray cheerlessness of a winter’s morning.  ’The place fascinates me; it turns me into a child, especially at night.  I like the glitter of shops and gas-lamps, and the throng of people in the light of them.  One understands what the Roman citizen felt.  I like driving about the streets in a hansom.  There are some one never gets tired of Oxford Street, for instance, and the turn out of Leicester Square into Coventry Street, with the blaze of Piccadilly Circus ahead.  One hears that poets starve in London, and are happy; I can believe it.  Well, I am keeping you from the shops, and myself from business.’

He shook hands with her and mounted his horse.

‘You have not yet seen my husband,’ she said, and she felt that she forced herself to speak the word.

‘Not yet.  I must look him up.  You live in Regent’s Park, don’t you?’

‘Close by.  Will you come some evening and dine?’

The invitation was accepted, and Drake rode off.  He rode well, Clarice noticed, and his horse was finely limbed and perfectly groomed.  The perception of these details had its effect.  She stood looking after him, then she turned slowly and made her way homewards across the Park.  Two of her acquaintances passed her and lifted their hats, but she took no notice of them; she did not see them.  A picture was fixed in her mind—­a picture of a rolling plain, black as midnight, exhaling blackness, so that the air itself was black for some feet above the ground; and into this cool and quiet darkness the moonbeams plunged out of a fiery sky and were lost.  They dropped, she fancied, after their long flight, to their appointed haven of repose.

The street door of her house gave on to a garden.  Clarice walked along the pathway in front of the house towards the door of the hall.  As she passed her husband’s study windows she glanced in.  He was standing in front of the fireplace, tearing across some sheets of manuscript.  Clarice hurried forwards.  He was always tearing up manuscript.  While she was upstairs taking off her hat she heard his door open and his voice complaining to the servants about some papers which had been mislaid.  She felt inclined to take the servants’ part.  After all, what was a man doing in the house all day?  There was a dragging shuffle of his slippers upon the floor of the hall.  The sound jarred on her.  She pinned on her hat again, ran downstairs, gave orders that she would not be in for lunch, and drove at once to Mrs. Willoughby’s.  She arrived in a state little short of hysterical.

‘Connie,’ she cried, almost before the servant who announced her was out of the room, ‘I know you don’t like me, but oh, I’m so unhappy!’

Mrs. Willoughby softened at sight of her evident distress.  ’Why, what’s the matter?’ she asked, and made her sit down beside her on the sofa.