The unexpectedness of the visit, and the manner in which Owen strode about the room, trying to talk of the things that he generally talked about, while clearly thinking of something quite different, struck Harding as unusual, and a suspicion of the truth had just begun to dawn upon him, when, breaking off suddenly, Owen said—­

“Swear you’ll never speak of what I am going to say—­and don’t ask for names.”

“I’ll tell no one,” said Harding, “and the name does not interest me.”

“It’s this:  a woman whom I have known many years—­a friendship that I thought would go on to the end of the chapter—­told me to-day that it was all finished, that she never wanted to see me again.”

“A friendship!  Were you her lover?”

“What does it matter?  Suffice it to say that she was my dearest friend, and now I have lost her.  She has been taken from me,” he said, throwing his arms into the air.  It was a superb gesture of despair, and Harding could not help smiling.

“So Evelyn has left him.  I wonder for whom?” Then, with as much sympathy as he could call into his voice, he asked if the lady had given any reason for this sudden dismissal.

“Only that she thinks it wrong; we’ve been discussing it all the afternoon.  It has made me quite ill;” and he dropped into a chair.

Harding knew perfectly well of whom they were speaking, and Owen knew that he knew, but it seemed more decorous to refrain from mentioning names, and Evelyn’s soul was discussed as if it were an abstract quantity, and all indication of the individual incarnation was avoided.  Owen admitted that, notwithstanding many seeming contradictory appearances, Evelyn had always thought it wrong to live with him, and yet, notwithstanding her being very fond of him, she had never shown any eagerness to be married.  “Of course it is very wrong,” she would say in her own enchanting way, “but a lover is very exciting, and a husband always seems dull.  I don’t think you’d be half as nice as a husband as you are as a lover.”  The recital of the Florence episode interested Harding, but it was the opposition of the priest and the musician that made the story from his point of view one of the most fascinating he had ever heard in his life.

They dined together in an old-fashioned club, in a room lighted by wax candles in silver candlesticks.  Tall mirrors in gold frames reflected the black mahogany furniture.  In answer to Owen, who lamented that Evelyn was sacrificing everything for an idea, Harding spoke, and with his usual conscious exaltation, of the Christian martyrs, the Spanish Inquisition, and then Robespierre seemed to him the most striking example of what men will do for an idea.  He mentioned a portrait by Greuze in which Robespierre appears as a beautiful young man.  “Such a face,” he said, “as we might imagine for a lover or a poet, a sort of Lucien de Rubempre, but in his brain there was a cell containing the pedantic idea, and for this idea he cut off a thousand heads, and would have cut off a million.  The world must conform to his idea, or it was a lost world.”