He called soon after six that evening, coming straight from the station to the house.  Miss Palliser was in the library, but his face as he entered bore such unmistakable signs of emotion that Kitty in the kindness of her heart withdrew.

He was alone there, as he had been on that evening of his first coming.  He looked round at the place he had loved so well, and knew that he was looking at it now for the last time.  At his feet the long shadow from the bust of Sophocles lay dusk upon the dull crimson; the level light from the west streamed over the bookshelves, lying softly on brown Russia leather and milk-white vellum, lighting up the delicate gold of the tooling, glowing in the blood-red splashes of the lettering pieces; it fell slant-wise on the black chimney piece, chiselling afresh the Harden motto:  Invictus.  There was nothing meretricious, nothing flagrantly modern there, as in that place of books he had just left; its bloom was the bloom of time, the beauty of a world already passing away.  Yet how he had loved it; how he had given himself up to it; how it had soothed him with its suggestion of immortal things.  And now, for this last time, he felt himself surrounded by intelligences, influences; above the voices of his anguish and his shame he heard the stately generations calling; they approved; they upheld him in his resolution.

He turned and saw Lucia standing beside him.  She had come in unheard, as on that evening which seemed now so long ago.

She held out her hand.  Not to have shaken hands with the poor fellow, would, she felt, have been to condemn him without a hearing.

He did not see the offered hand, nor yet the chair it signed to him to take.  As if he knew that he was on his trial, he stood rigidly before her.  His eyes alone approached her, looking to hers to see if they condemned him.

Lucia’s eyes were strictly non-committal.  They, too, seemed to stand still, to wait, wide and expectant, for his defence.  Her attitude was so far judicial that she was not going to help him by a leading question.  She merely relieved the torture of his visible bodily constraint by inviting him to sit down.  He dropped into a chair that stood obliquely by the window, and screwed himself round in it so as to face her.

“I saw my father this morning,” he began.  “I went up by the early train.”

“I know.”

“Then you know by this time that I was a day too late.”

“Mr. Pilkington sent me your father’s letter.”

“What did you think of it?”

The question, so cool, so sudden, so direct, was not what she felt she had a right to expect from him.

“Well—­what did you think of it yourself?”

She looked at him and saw that she had said a cruel thing.

“Can’t you imagine what I think of it?”

This again was too sudden; it took her at a disadvantage, compelling her instantly to commit herself to a theory of innocence or complicity.