After luncheon he again fell back upon the dogged boldness.  Unable to contemplate a second plunge into the solitude of the Temple Court offices, he asked and was accorded permission to take Patricia for a country drive in the little car.  When the city was left behind, and the small machine was purring steadily northwestward over a road which led to nowhere in particular, Blount put his finger accurately upon the thing which had been building little barriers of silence between them all the way out from town.

“You knew me well enough yesterday to be reasonably certain of what I would do in given circumstances, didn’t you, Patricia?” he began abruptly.  “To-day you are not so sure about it.  Why?”

She laughed lightly, but there was a serious undernote in her voice when she said:  “There are moments when you make me wonder if you haven’t been dabbling in necromancy, Evan.  I was at that very instant telling myself that it wasn’t so.”

“But you know it is so,” he persisted.  “Why am I different?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yet you recognize the fact?”

“Is it a fact?” she queried.

“Yes.”

“In what way are you different?”

“I am not altogether certain that I know, myself.  But I do know this:  between yesterday and to-day there is a gulf so wide that it seems measureless.  The scientists claim there are no cataclysms; no sudden and sweeping changes taking place either in the physical or the metaphysical field.  If that be true, the changes must go on subconsciously for a long time before they are recognized.  There is no other way of accounting for the gulfs.”

“You are talking miles over my head,” she protested; and, though the assertion was not strictly true, it served its purpose.

“I can make it a little plainer,” he went on, slowing the motor until the small car was merely ambling.  “You remember that night at Wartrace Hall, and what you told me?  I went out from that talk resolved to do what you had shown me I ought to do, stubbornly refusing to consider the possibility of failure.  None the less, I have failed.”

“Oh, no!” she exclaimed; “not that!”

“Yes, just that.  But the failure is not the worst thing that has befallen me.  I have lost or gained something that pushes the yesterdays into a past which can never be recovered.  Let me tell you, girl:  I have been fighting in the open, against treachery and deceit fighting always under cover.  I have been fighting bare-handed where others were armed.  Day by day I have been finding out the baseness and the trickery; how my own side has used me as a screen behind which the old dishonorable expedients could be safely planned and carried out.  I never knew until within the past two days what all this chicanery and double-dealing might be doing to me, but now I do know.”

“Will it bear telling?” she asked quietly.