Aldous raised his shoulders.

“I don’t imagine there is any lack of that!  But certainly he holds himself aloof from nothing and nobody!  I hear of him everywhere.”

“What!—­among the smart people?”

Aldous nodded.

“A change of policy by all accounts,” said Hallin, musing.  “He must do it with intention.  He is not the man to let himself be be-Capua-ed all at once.”

“Oh dear, no!” said Aldous, drily.  “He does it with intention.  Nobody supposes him to be the mere toady.  All the same I think he may very well overrate the importance of the class he is trying to make use of, and its influence.  Have you been following the strike ‘leaders’ in the Clarion?”

“No!” cried Hallin, flushing.  “I would not read them for the world!  I might not be able to go on giving to the strike.”

Aldous fell silent, and Hallin presently saw that his mind had harked back to the one subject that really held the depths of it.  The truest friendship, Hallin believed, would be never to speak to him of Marcella Boyce—­never to encourage him to dwell upon her, or upon anything connected with her.  But his yearning, sympathetic instinct would not let him follow his own conviction.

“Miss Boyce, you know, has been here two or three times while you have been away,” he said quickly, as he got up to post a letter.

Aldous hesitated; then he said—­

“Do you gather that her nursing life satisfies her?”

Hallin made a little face.

“Since when has she become a person likely to be ‘satisfied’ with anything?  She devotes to it a splendid and wonderful energy.  When she comes here I admire her with all my heart, and pity her so much that I could cry over her!”

Aldous started.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, as he too rose and laid his hand on Hallin’s for a moment.  “But don’t tell me!  It’s best for me not to talk of her.  If she were associated in my mind with any other man than Wharton, I think somehow I could throw the whole thing off.  But this—­this—­” He broke off; then resumed, while he pretended to look for a parcel he had brought with him, by way of covering an agitation he could not suppress.  “A person you and I know said to me the other day, ’It may sound unromantic, but I could never think of a woman who had thrown me over except with ill-will.’ The word astonished me, but sometimes I understand it.  I find myself full of anger to the most futile, the most ridiculous degree!”

He drew himself up nervously, already scorning his own absurdity, his own breach of reticence.  Hallin laid his hands on the taller man’s shoulders, and there was a short pause.

“Never mind, old fellow,” said Hallin, simply, at last, as his hands dropped; “let’s go and do our work.  What is it you’re after?—­I forget.”

Aldous found his packet and his hat, explaining himself again, meanwhile, in his usual voice.  He had dropped in on Hallin for a morning visit, meaning to spend some hours before the House met in the investigation of some small workshops in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane.  The Home Office had been called upon for increased inspection and regulation; there had been a great conflict of evidence, and Aldous had finally resolved in his student’s way to see for himself the state of things in two or three selected streets.