Then Peter met full the bright, hard, vivid gaze of the alert Cheriton.  It had an odd expression at this moment; unmistakably inimical, observantly curious, distinctly sardonic.  A faint ironic smile just touched the corners of his determined mouth.  Peter returned the look with his puzzled, enquiring eyes that sought to understand.

This much, anyhow, he seemed to understand:  his role was silence.  If Cheriton didn’t speak (and Cheriton’s expression showed that he knew) and if Hilary didn’t speak ... well, he, Peter, couldn’t speak either.  He must acquiesce in what appeared to be a conspiracy to keep this pathetic, worn-out dilettante in a fool’s paradise.

The pathos of it gripped Peter’s heart.  Lord Evelyn had once known so well.  What havoc was this that one could apparently make of one’s faculties?  It wasn’t only physical semi-blindness; it was a blindness of the mind, a paralysis of the powers of discrimination and appreciation, which, was pitiful.  Peter was angry.  He thought Hilary and Cheriton so abominably, unmitigatedly wrong.  And yet he himself had said, “If it makes them happy”—­and left that as the indubitable end.  Ah, but one didn’t lie to people, even for that.

Peter was brought up sharply, as he had often been before, against Hilary’s strange Hilaryish, perverted views of the conduct of life’s businesses.  Then, as usual when he should have felt furthest from mirth, he abruptly collapsed into sudden helpless laughter.

Lord Evelyn turned the eye-glass on him.

“Eh?” he queried.  “Why so?  But never mind; you always suffered in that way, I remember.  Get it from your mother, I think; she did, too.  Never explain jokes; they lose so in the telling.  Now I want to show you something over here.”

Peter crossed the room, his laughter dead.  After all, funny wasn’t what it really was.  Mainly, it was perplexing.  Till he could have it out with Hilary, he couldn’t understand it at all.

He saw more of Lord Evelyn’s treasures, and perplexity grew.  He did not laugh again; he was very solemn and very silent and very polite where he could not admire.  Where he could he did; but even here his admiration was weighed down to soberness by the burden of the things beyond the pale.

Lord Evelyn found him lukewarm, changed and dulled from the vivid devotee of old, who had coloured up all over his pale face at the sight of a Bow rose-bowl.  He coloured indeed now, when Lord Evelyn said “Like it?”—­coloured and murmured indistinguishable comments into his collar.  He coloured most when Lord Evelyn said, as he frequently did, “Your brother’s find.  A delicious little man in some sotto-portico or other—­quite an admirable person.  Eh, Margerison?”

Hilary in the background would vaguely assent.  Peter, who looked at him no more, felt the indefinable challenge of his tone.  It meant either, “I’ve as much right to my artistic taste as you have, Peter, and I’m not ashamed of it,” or, “Speak out, if you want to shatter the illusions that make the happiness of his ridiculous life; if not, be silent.”