“You mean,” said Ayre, “there may be an affectation of freshness and enthusiasm—­gush, in fact—­as bad, or worse, than cynicism, and really springing from the same root?”

Kate had not arrived at any such definite meaning, but she nodded her head.

“An assumed sprightliness,” continued Ayre cheerfully, “perhaps coquettishness?”

“Exactly,” Kate assented, “and a way of pushing into conversations which my mother used to say girls had better let alone.”

This was tolerably direct, but it did not satisfy Ayre’s malicious humor, and he was on the point of a new question when Haddington, who had taken no part in the previous conversation, but had his reasons for interfering now, put in suavely: 

“If Miss Bernard and you, Ayre, will forgive me, are we not wandering from the point?”

“Was there any point to wander from?” suggested Eugene.

So they drifted through the evening, skirting the coast of quarrels and talking of everything except that of which they were thinking.  Verily, love affairs do not always conduce to social enjoyment—­more especially other people’s love affairs.  Still, Sir Roderick Ayre was entertained.

Meanwhile, Stafford sat in his room alone, save for the company of his own picture.  He was like a man who has been groping his way through difficult paths in the dark—­uneasy, it may be, and nervous, but with no serious alarm.  On a sudden, a storm-flash may reveal to him that he is on the very edge of a precipice or already ankle-deep in some bottomless morass.  The sight of his own face, interpreted with all Morewood’s penetrating insight and mastery of hand, had been a revelation to him.  No more mercilessly candid messenger could have been found.  Arguments he would have resisted or confuted; appeals to his own consciousness would have failed for want of experience; he could not affect to disbelieve the verdict of his own countenance.  He had in all his life been a man who dealt plainly with himself; it was only in this last matter that the power, more than the will, to understand his own heart had failed him.  His intellect now reasserted itself.  He did not attempt to blink facts; he did not deny the truth of the revelation or seek to extenuate its force.  He did not tell himself that the matter was a trifle, or that its effect would be transient.  He recognized that he had fallen from the state of a priest vowed to Heaven, to that of a man whose whole heart and mind had gone out in love for a woman and were filled with her image.  His judgment of himself was utterly reversed, his pre-suppositions confounded, his scheme of life wrecked; all this he knew for truth, unless indeed it might be that victory could still be his—­victory after a struggle even to death; a struggle that had found no type or forecast in the mimic contests that had marked, almost without disturbing, his earlier progress on the road of his choice.