When Lightmark was alone, he stood for a few minutes before the fire in meditation; then he clenched his fist viciously.

“Confound the girl, and him, too!  No, poor devil! he meant well.  It was just the senseless, quixotic sort of thing one would have expected of him.  But I don’t know that it has done much good.  It has made me feel a sneak, though I’ve only been lying to back him up.  Why couldn’t he let it alone?  There would have been a storm, of course, but it would soon have blown over, and no one else need have known.”

He stopped in front of a mirror—­he had been pacing up and down the room—­and found himself looking rather pale in the soft, brilliant glow of the incandescent lamps.  Moreover, the clock pointed to an hour very near that for which the carriage had been ordered.

While he was dressing for dinner, it occurred to him—­it was not for the first time—­that, after all, it would take very little to render Rainham’s bungling devotion, and his own meritorious aberrations from the path of truth, worse than nugatory.  For what if Kitty should split?—­so he elegantly expressed his fears—­what if the girl, of whom he had heard nothing since the day of that deplorable scene, should break loose, and throw up the part which she had undertaken upon such very short notice?

Decidedly, he felt that he was abundantly justified in resenting the false position into which he had been thrust; the imposture was too glaring.  Would it not even now be well to remodel the situation with a greater semblance of adherence to facts—­to make a clean breast of it?  The crudity of the idea offended him; the process would necessarily be wanting in art.  But possibly it was not yet too late to substitute a story which, if it caused him temporary discomfort, would at least leave him more certain of the future, the master of an easier, a less violently outraged conscience.

At dinner the taciturnity, bordering on moroseness, of a talker usually so brilliant led his host to surmise that Lightmark had ruined a picture, his hostess to conclude that he had quarrelled with his wife.  He came home early, and occupied the small hours of the morning in forming an amended plan of campaign, of which the first move took the shape of a somewhat voluminous letter, addressed to Philip Rainham.

CHAPTER XXVII

Charles Sylvester was a man of a somewhat austere punctuality, and there were few of his habits in which he took a juster pride than in the immemorial regularity with which he distributed the first few hours of his day.  To rise at half-past seven, whatever might be the state of the temperature or the condition of the air; to reach the breakfast-room on the stroke of eight, and to devote half an hour to the perusal of the Times and of his more intimate correspondence—­of course, there were certain letters which he reserved until his arrival in chambers—­while he discussed a moderate breakfast which seldom varied; to ride in the Row for another half-hour; and finally, having delivered his horse to a groom, who met him at the corner of Park Lane, to enter the precincts of the Temple, after a brisk walk through Piccadilly and the Strand, shortly after ten—­these were infallible articles in his somewhat rigid creed.