But these promptings were dumb in him for the moment from lack of co-ordination.  The two or three things he might have said seemed to strangle each other in the attempt to get right of way.  In response to Guion’s confidences he could only mumble something incoherent and pass on to the drawing-room door.  It was a wide opening, hung with portieres, through which he could see Olivia Guion standing by the crackling wood fire, a foot on the low fender.  One hand rested lightly on the mantelpiece, while the other drew back her skirt of shimmering black from the blaze.  Drusilla Fane, at the piano, was strumming one of Chopin’s more familiar nocturnes.

He was still thinking of this glimpse when, a half-hour later, he said to Rodney Temple, as they walked homeward in the moonlight:  “I haven’t yet told you what I came back for.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I thought—­that is, I hoped—­that if I did the way might open up for me to do what might be called—­well, a little good.”

“What put that into your head?” was the old man’s response to this stammering confession.

“I suppose the thought occurred to me on general principles.  I’ve always understood it was the right thing to attempt.”

“Oh, right.  That’s another matter.  Doing right is as easy as drawing breath.  It’s a habit, like any other.  To start out to do good is much like saying you’ll add a cubit to your stature.  But you can always do right.  Do right, and the good’ll take care of itself.”

Davenant reflected on this in silence as they tramped onward.  By this time they had descended Tory Hill, and were on the dike that outlines the shores of the Charles.

By a common impulse both Temple and Davenant kept silent concerning Guion.  On leaving Tory Hill they had elected to walk homeward, the ladies taking the carriage.  The radiant moonlight and the clear, crisp October air helped to restore Davenant’s faculties to a normal waking condition after the nightmare of Guion’s hints.  Fitting what he supposed must be the facts into the perspective of common life, to which the wide, out-of-door prospect offered some analogy, they were, if not less appalling, at least less overwhelming.  Without seeing what was to be done much more clearly than he had seen an hour ago, he had a freer consciousness of power—­something like the matter-of-course assumption that any given situation could be met with which he ordinarily faced the world.  That he lacked authority in the case was a thought that did not occur to him—­no more than it occurred to him on the day when he rescued the woman from drowning, or on the night when he had dashed into the fire to save a man.