‘I didn’t know,’ said Camilla simply.  ’How should I know a thing like that?’

‘I have no doubt that young Powitt is already free.  And if he is—­’

‘You think that Mr. Ravengar’s suicide may not have been a suicide?’

Hugo hesitated.

‘Yes,’ he said, and lapsed into reflection.

* * * * *

‘I shall see you home,’ he said.

‘I am going to walk,’ she replied.  ’And I have to get my things from the cloak-room.’

‘I will walk with you,’ he said.

‘What style the woman has!’ he thought, enraptured.

They proceeded southwards in silence.  Then suddenly she asked how he had left Mr. Darcy, and they began to talk about Darcy and Paris.  Hugo encouraged her.  He wished to know the worst.

‘Except my father,’ she said, ’I have never met anyone with more sense than Mr. Darcy, or anyone more kind.  I might have been dead now if it hadn’t been for Mr. Darcy.’

‘Mr. Darcy is a very decent fellow,’ Hugo remarked experimentally.

She turned and gave him a look.  No, it was not a look; it was the merest fraction of a look, but it withered him up.

‘She loves him!’ he thought.  ’And what’s more, if she hadn’t made up her mind to marry him, she wouldn’t be so precious easy and facile and friendly with me.  I might have guessed that.’

They passed Victoria Station, and came into Horseferry Road.  She had informed him that she had taken a furnished room in Horseferry Road.  The high and sinister houses appeared unspeakably and disgracefully mean to him in the wintry gloom of the gaslights.  She halted before a tenement that seemed even more odious than its neighbours.  Was it possible that she should exist in such a quarter?  The idea sickened him.

‘Which floor?’ he questioned.

‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘the top, the fifth.  Good-night, Mr. Hugo.’

He pictured the mean and frowsy room, and shuddered.  Yet what could he do?  What right had he to interfere, to criticise, to ameliorate?

‘Good-night,’ she repeated, and in a moment she had opened the door with a latchkey and disappeared.  He stood staring at the door.  He had by no means finished saying all that he meant to say to her.  He must talk to her further.  He must show her that he could not be dismissed in that summary fashion.  He mounted the two dirty steps, and rang the bell in a determined manner.  He heard it tinkle distantly.

She was divine, adorable, marvellous, and far beyond the deserts of any man; but she had not shaken hands with him, and she had treated him as she might have treated one of the shopwalkers.  Moreover, the question of to-morrow had to be decided.

There was no answer to the bell, and he rang again, with an increase of energy.

Then he perceived through the fanlight an illumination in the hall.  The door opened cautiously, as such doors always do open, and a middle-aged man in a dressing-gown stood before him.  In the background he descried a small table with a candle on it, and the foul, polished walls of the narrow lobby—­a representative London lodging-house.