Stephen himself is leaning back against the mantelpiece, as his habit is, and yawning slightly.  He has just been beaten, and he is a man who can’t play a losing game.

“No,” his brother remarks.  “I didn’t know what the deuce ‘Ladas’ meant till I looked it up; did you, Steve?”

“Oh, I should think every schoolboy would know that,” is the curt response, and at that moment the servant’s knock comes at the door.

“Please, sir, there’s a lady as wants to see you,” the girl says with a perceptible grin.  “She said she wouldn’t come up, and she’s waiting in the hall, sir.”

There is a blank silence in the room.  Brookes pales suddenly, and his eyebrows, that habitually have a supercilious elevation, rise still higher with annoyance.

He hesitates a single second, then, without a word in reply, he crosses the room towards the door, and the servant retreats hastily.

The men glance furtively at each other, but Stephen’s devil of a temper being well known, they forbear to laugh or even smile till he is well out of the room.  Brookes goes down the stairs with one sentence only in his mind:  Coming to my rooms, and making a fool of me!

He is annoyed, intensely annoyed, and that is his sole feeling.

May is standing upright now in the centre of the hall under the swinging lamp, and she watches him run lightly down the long flight of stairs towards her with swimming eyes.

What is there in that figure of his that has so much influence on her senses?  More, perhaps, even than his face, do the lines of his neck and shoulders and their carriage please her.  All the pleasure she can ever realise in life seems contained for her in that slim, well-made frame, in its blue serge suit.

She makes one impetuous step forward, her whole form dominated, impelled by the surge of ardent feelings within her, and holds out one trembling, burning hand.  Stephen, with a confused sense of its being awfully bad form that she should be standing in his hall, takes it in his right hand, feeling hastily for the lucifers with his left.

“Er—­come into the dining-room, won’t you?” he says, with the familiar, supercilious accent that with him is the expression of suppressed annoyance and slight embarrassment.

He knows the rooms are unlet, and with gratitude for this providential circumstance in his thoughts, and his heart beating violently with sudden excitement now he is actually in her presence, he turns the handle of the door and sets it wide open.

He strikes a match and holds it up, leaning back against the door, for her to pass in before him.

As she does so, their two figures for one second almost touch each other, and a sudden glow lights up in his veins.  He feels it, and it warns him instantly to summon his self-control.  That before everything.

The next moment he follows her into the room, lights the gas, returns to the door, closes it, and then comes back towards the rug where she is standing.