He returned to the attack, and this time a charwoman appeared.  At sight of the Dean’s legs and apron, she dropped a courtesy, or something like one, informing him that they had workmen in the house and Mr. Ashe was “staying with her ladyship.”

The Dean took the Tranmores’ number in Park Lane and departed thither, not without a sad glance at the desolate hall behind the charwoman and at the darkened windows of the drawing-room overhead.  He thought of that May day two years before when he had dropped in to lunch with Lady Kitty; his memory, equally effective whether it summoned the detail of an English chronicle or the features of a face once seen, placed firm and clear before him the long-chinned fellow at Lady Kitty’s left, to whose villany that empty and forsaken house bore cruel witness.  And the little lady herself—­what a radiant and ethereal beauty!  Ah me! ah me!

He walked on in meditation, his hands behind his back.  Even in this May London the little Dean was capable of an abstracted spirit, and he had still much to think over.  He had his appointment with Ashe.  But Ashe had written—­evidently in a press of business—­from the House, and had omitted to mention his temporary change of address.  The Dean regretted it.  He would rather have done his errand with Lady Kitty’s injured husband on some neutral ground, and not in Lady Tranmore’s house.

At Park Lane, however, he was immediately admitted.

“Mr. Ashe will be down directly, sir,” said the butler, as he ushered the visitor into the commodious library on the ground-floor, which had witnessed for so long the death-in-life of Lord Tranmore.  But now Lord Tranmore was bedridden up-stairs, with two nurses to look after him, and to judge from the aspect of the tables piled with letters and books, and from the armful of papers which a private secretary carried off with him as he disappeared before the Dean, Ashe was now fully at home in the room which had been his father’s.

There was still a fire in the grate, and the small Dean, who was a chilly mortal, stood on the rug looking nervously about him.  Lord Tranmore had been in office himself, and the room, with its bookshelves filled with volumes in worn calf bindings, its solid writing-tables and leather sofas, its candlesticks and inkstands of old silver, slender and simple in pattern, its well-worn Turkey carpet, and its political portraits—­“the Duke,” Johnny Russell, Lord Althorp, Peel, Melbourne—­seemed, to the observer on the rug, steeped in the typical habit and reminiscence of English public life.

Well, if the father, poor fellow, had been distinguished in his day, the son had gone far beyond him.  The Dean ruminated on a conversation wherewith he had just beguiled his cup of tea at the Athenaeum—­a conversation with one of the shrewdest members of Lord Parham’s cabinet, a “new man,” and an enthusiastic follower of Ashe.