In the matter of preparation the most important detail would be to tell Olivia.  Hoping against hope that this would never become necessary, he had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel.  But he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now, when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed.  As he turned into his own grounds that day it seemed to him that his deadness of emotion was such that he could carry the thing through mechanically, as a skilled surgeon uses a knife.  If he found her at tea in the drawing-room he might tell her then.

He found her at tea, but there were people with her.  He was almost sorry; and yet it keyed him up to see that there was some necessity “to still play the gentleman.”  He played it, and played it well—­with much of his old-time ease.  The feat was so extraordinary as to call out a round of mental applause for himself; and, after all, he reflected, there would be time enough in the evening.

But tea being over, Miss Guion announced that Mr. and Mrs. Temple and Drusilla Fane were coming informally to dinner, bringing with them a guest of theirs, “some one of the name of Davenant.”  For an instant he felt that he must ask her to telephone and put them off, but on second thoughts it seemed better to let them come.  It would be in the nature of a reprieve, not so much for himself as for Olivia.  It would give her one more cheerful evening, the last, perhaps, in her life.  Besides—­the suggestion was a vague one, sprung doubtless of the hysterical element in his suppressed excitement—­he might test his avowals on Temple and Davenant, getting a foretaste of what it would be to face the world.  He formed no precise intention of doing that; he only allowed his mind to linger on the luxury of trying it.  He had suspected lately that Rodney Temple knew more of his situation than he had ever told him, so that the way to speak out would be cleared in advance; and as for the man of the name of Davenant—­probably Tom Davenant’s adopted son, who was said to have pulled off some good things a few years ago—­there would be, in humbling himself before one so successful, a morbid joy of the kind the devotee may get in being crushed by an idol.

In this he was not mistaken.  While they were there he was able to draw from his own speeches, covert or open, the relief that comes to a man in pain from moaning.  Now that they were gone, however, the last extraneous incident that could possibly stand between him and the beginning of the end had passed.  The moment he had foreseen, as one foresees death, was on him; so, raising his head from the woodwork of the doorway, he braced himself, and said, “Now!”

At almost the same instant he heard the rustle of his daughter’s skirts as she came from the drawing-room on her way up-stairs.  She advanced slowly down the broad hail, the lights striking iridescent rays from the trimmings of her dress.  The long train, adding to her height, enhanced her gracefulness.  Only that curious deadness of sensation of which he had been aware all day—­the inability to feel any more that comes from too much suffering—­enabled him to keep his ground before her.  He did keep it, advancing from the doorway two or three steps toward her, till they met at the foot of the stairway.