‘No, sir,’ said Albert Shawn, unmoved.  ’She is not, because Mr. Tudor shunted out all his servants soon afterwards.  Miss Payne was shown into his study.  She had her tea there, and her dinner.  The Hugo half-guinea dinner was ordered late by telephone for two persons, and rushed up at eight o’clock.’

‘I wonder Mr. Tudor didn’t order an orchestra with the dinner,’ said Hugo grimly.  It was a sublime effort on his part to be his natural self.

‘I waited for Miss Payne to leave,’ continued Albert Shawn.  ’That’s why I’m so late.’

‘And what time did she leave?’

‘She hasn’t left,’ said Albert Shawn.

CHAPTER IV

CAMILLA

Hugo dismissed Albert, with orders to continue his vigil, and then he rang for Simon.

‘Do you think I might have some tea?’ he asked.

‘I am disposed to think you might, sir,’ said Simon the cellarer.  ’It is eight days since you indulged after dinner.’

‘Bring me one cup, then, poured out.’

He was profoundly disturbed by Albert’s news.  He was, in fact, miserable.  He had a physical pain in the region of the heart.  He wished he could step off Love as one steps off an omnibus, but he found that Love resembled an express train more than an omnibus.

‘Can she be secretly married to him?’ he demanded half aloud, sipping at the tea.

The idea soothed him exactly as much as it alarmed him.

‘The question is,’ he murmured angrily, ’am I or am I not an ass?...  At my age!’

He felt vaguely that he was not, that he was rather a splendid and Byronic figure in the grip of tremendous emotions.

Having regretfully finished the tea, he unlocked a bookcase, and picked out at random a volume of Boswell’s ‘Johnson.’  It was the modern Oxford edition—­the only edition worthy of a true amateur—­bound by Riviere.  Like all wise and lettered men, Hugo consulted Boswell in the grave crises of life, and to-night he happened upon the venerable Johnson’s remark:  ’Sir, I would be content to spend the remainder of my existence driving about in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.’

He leaned back in his chair and laughed.  ’In the whole history of mankind,’ he asserted to the dome, ’there have only been two really sensible men.  Solomon was one, and Johnson the other.’

He restored the book to its place, and sat down to the piano-player, and in a moment the overture to ‘Tannhaeuser,’ that sublime failure to prove that passion is folly, filled the vast apartment.  The rushing violin passages, and every call of Aphrodite, intoxicated his soul and raised his spirits till he knew with the certainty of a fully-aroused instinct that Camilla Payne must be his.  He became optimistic on all points.

‘A lady insists on seeing you, sir,’ said Simon Shawn, intruding upon the Pilgrims’ Chant.