Rainham paused a moment:  it was not only a passing thought of Oswyn’s acrimony, and of the difficult minutes during which he had been thrown across Lightmark at the Dock, that constrained him; it was rather the recollection of his own careful scrutiny of the disputed canvas, when he had at last dragged himself with a disagreeable sense of moral responsibility into Burlington House, and had come away at last strangely dissatisfied.  Acquitting Dick of any conscious plagiarism, of a breach of common honesty, he was disagreeably filled with a sense of the work’s immeasurable inferiority to Oswyn’s ruined masterpiece.  It was clever, and audacious, and striking; it had had the fortune to be splendidly hung, and that was all, for all his goodwill, he could say.  And since, after all, that was so little, would strike his friend as but a cold tribute after the panegyrics of the morning papers, he preferred to say nothing, deftly dropping the subject, and responding to the first half of his friend’s question alone.

“My domain, Dick?  Ah, I forgot; you can hardly have heard that it is my domain no longer—­or ceases to be very shortly.  That has come to an end; I have sold it.”

Lightmark whistled softly.

“Well, you surprise me!  Of course I am glad; we will be glad too.  We shall see more of you now, I suppose? or will you live abroad?”

“Abroad?” echoed Rainham absently.  “Oh, yes, very probably.  But tell me, how is—­Eve?”

“As we seem to be arriving, I think I will let her tell you herself.”

They descended, and Rainham waited silently while his friend discharged the cabman, and let him in with his latch-key into the bright, spacious hall.  Then, after glancing into the empty drawing-room, Lightmark preceded him up the thick carpeted stairs, on which their footsteps scarcely sounded, and stopped at the door of Eve’s boudoir, through which a woman’s voice, speaking rather rapidly, and, as it struck him, in a key of agitation, fell upon Rainham’s ear with a certain familiarity, though he was sure it was not Eve’s, and could not remember when or where he might have heard it.  After a moment they went in.

CHAPTER XXIII

There are occasions when thought is terribly and comprehensively sudden:  the rudimentary processes of reasoning, by analogy and syllogism, so slow and so laborious, turn to divination.  We have an occult vision, immediate and complete, into the obscure manner of life, and crowd an infinity of discovery into a very few seconds.  It was so with Philip Rainham now.  Lightmark had scarcely closed the door, against which he now stood in a black silence, with the air of a man turned to stone; Rainham’s eyes had only fallen once upon the two figures on the sofa—­Eve crushed in a corner, a sorrowful, dainty shape in the silk and lace of her pretty tea-gown, with the white drawn face of a scared child; Kitty Crichton,