The quick, elastic nature adjusted itself at once.  To some kinds of success, nothing is so important as the ability to forget—­to sweep the mind free of everything irrelevant and superfluous.  Marcella Boyce, and all connected with her, passed clean out of Wharton’s consciousness.  Except that once or twice he said to himself with a passing smile that it was a good thing he had not got himself into a worse scrape at Mellor.  Good heavens! in what plight would a man stand—­a man with his career to make—­who had given Marcella Boyce claims upon him!  As well entangle oneself with the Tragic Muse at once as with that stormy, unmanageable soul!

So much for a year ago.  To-night, however, the past had been thrust back upon him, both by Lady Selina’s talk and by the meeting with Raeburn.  To smart indeed once more under that old ascendency of Raeburn’s, was to be provoked into thinking of Raeburn’s old love.

Where was Miss Boyce?  Surely her year of hospital training must be up by now?

He turned into St. James Street, stopped at a door not far from the Palace end, let himself in, and groped his way to the second floor.  A sleepy man-servant turned out of his room, and finding that his master was not inclined to go to bed, brought lights and mineral water.  Wharton was practically a teetotaller.  He had taken a whim that way as a boy, and a few experiments in drunkenness which he had made at college had only confirmed what had been originally perhaps a piece of notoriety-hunting.  He had, as a rule, flawless health; and the unaccustomed headaches and nausea which followed these occasional excesses had disgusted and deterred him.  He shook himself easily free of a habit which had never gained a hold upon him, and had ever since found his abstinence a source both of vanity and of distinction.  Nothing annoyed him more than to hear it put down to any ethical motive.  “If I liked the beastly stuff, I should swim in it to-morrow,” he would say with an angry eye when certain acquaintance—­not those he made at Labour Congresses—­goaded him on the point.  “As it is, why should I make it, or chloral, or morphia, or any other poison, my master!  What’s the inducement—­eh, you fellows?”

En revanche he smoked inordinately.

“Is that all, sir,” said his servant, pausing behind his chair, after candles, matches, cigarettes, and Apollinaris had been supplied in abundance.

“Yes; go to bed, Williams, but don’t lock up.  Good-night.”

The man departed, and Wharton, going to the window which opened on a balcony looking over St. James Street, threw it wide, and smoked a cigarette leaning against the wall.  It was on the whole a fine night and warm, though the nip of the east wind was not yet out of the air.  In the street below there was still a good deal of movement, for it was only just past midnight and the clubs were not yet empty.  To his right the turreted gate-house of the Palace with its clock rose dark against a sky covered with light, windy cloud.  Beyond it his eye sought instinctively for the Clock Tower, which stood to-night dull and beaconless—­like some one in a stupid silence.  That light of the sitting House had become to him one of the standing pleasures of life.  He had never yet been honestly glad of its extinction.