There was an inflection on the now which again gave him strange and sudden thrills, as though some extraordinary chemical agent had been infused into his blood.  All kinds of capitulations were implied in it—­changes of heart and mind and attitude—­changes that had come about imperceptibly, and for reasons which he, and perhaps she, could not have followed.  He felt the upleaping of great joy.  It was joy so intense that it made him tactful, temperate.  It also made him want to rush away and be alone.

“I’ll make that do for the present,” he said, smiling down at her through the darkness.  “Thank you for letting me come.  Good night.”

“Good night.”

There was again that barely noticeable lingering of her hand in his.  The repetition rather disappointed him.  “It’s just her way of shaking hands,” was the explanation he gave of it.

When he had passed out of the gate he pretended to take his way down Algonquin Avenue, but he only crossed the Street to the shelter of a friendly elm.  There he could watch her tall, white figure as it went slowly up the driveway.  Except for a dim light in the fan-shaped window over the front door the house was dark.  The white figure moved with an air of dragging itself along.

“It isn’t the most important thing in the world for her,” he whispered to himself, “to marry—­the man she cares for.”

There was a renewal of his blind fury against Ashley, while at the same time he found himself groaning, inwardly:  “I wish to God the man she cares for wasn’t such a—­such a—­trump!”

XVIII

When the colonel of the Sussex Rangers woke on the following morning the Umfraville element in him, fatigued doubtless with the demands of the previous day, still slept on.  That strain in him which had made his maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second, and roysterers with George the Fourth—­loyal, swashbuckling, and impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief one day or another, as they had come—­that strain lying dormant, Ashley was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes.  In other words he woke in alarm.  It was very real alarm.  It was alarm not unlike that of the gambler who realizes in the cold stare of morning that for a night’s excitement he has thrown away a fortune.

The feeling was so dreadful that, as he lay for a few minutes with his eyes closed, he could say without exaggeration that he had never felt anything so sickening in his life.  It was worse than the blue funk that attended the reveille for his first battle—­worse than the bluer remorse that had come with the dawn after some of his more youthful sprees.  The only parallel to it he could find was in the desolation of poor creatures he had seen, chiefly in India, reduced suddenly by fire, flood, or earthquake to the skin they stood in and a lodging on the ground.  His swaggering promises of yesterday had brought him as near as possible to that.