“Poor chap! it must be dreadful seeing me come in and out of the house, suspecting every time I am going to or coming from her.  But it was his own will that I should try to get her back to the stage and away from Monsignor.  All the same, it must have been devilishly unpleasant.”  Ulick was very sorry for Owen, and hoped that if he did succeed in tempting Evelyn away from Monsignor Owen would not hate him for having done so.  Nothing is more common than to hate one’s collaborator.  Ulick laughed and suddenly grew serious.  “His years are against him.  Old age, always a terror, becomes in an affair of this kind a special terror, for there is no hope; she will never go back to him, so I might as well get her.  If I don’t, Monsignor will”; and a smile appeared again on his face, for he had begun to feel that he would succeed in persuading Evelyn to accept the engagement, and to do that would mean taking him on as a lover.

When he lighted a cigar the conviction was borne in upon him, as the phrase goes, that to travel in an opera company without a mistress would be unendurable....  Where could he get one equal to Evelyn?  Nowhere.  No one in the company was comparable to her; and of course he loved her, and she loved him:  differently, in some strange way he feared, but still she loved him, or was attracted to him—­it did not matter which so long as he could succeed in persuading her to accept the engagement which his directors were most anxious to conclude.  As they walked through Kensington Gardens that afternoon he had noticed how she had begun to talk suddenly on the question whether it would be permissible for a woman in certain circumstances to take a second lover, if her life with her first were entirely broken, and so on.  He had answered perfunctorily, and as soon as possible turned the conversation upon other things.  But it had come back—­led back by her unconsciously to the moral question.  So it would seem that she was coming round.  But there was something hysterical, something so outside of herself—­something so irresponsible in her yielding to him, that he did not altogether like the adventure which he had undertaken, and asked himself if he loved her sufficiently, finding without difficulty many reasons for loving her.  Nowhere could he find anybody whom he admired more, or who interested him more.  He had loved her, and they had spent a pleasant time together in that cottage on the river.  A memory of it lit up his sensual imagination, and he determined to continue the experience just as any other young man would.  Evelyn had denied herself to him in Italy for some strange reason; whatever that reason was it had been overcome, and once she yielded herself she was glorious.  What happened before would happen again, and if things did not turn out as pleasantly as he hoped they would—­that is to say, if she would not remain in the opera company, well, the fault would not be with him.  She sang very well, though not as well as Owen thought; and he went upstairs to dress for dinner, thinking how pleasant it was to live in Berkeley Square.