“I think we must be off,” he said, consulting his watch.  “Where is Rainham going to take you?”

“To Florence,” she said, smiling, “to the Zoo.”

“Ah, a good idea,” he murmured.  “Well, good-bye, Lady Garnett; good-day, Rainham.  I am sorry to see you don’t seem to have benefited much by your winter abroad.  I almost wonder you came back so soon.  Was not it rather unwise?  This treacherous climate, you know.”

“Yes,” said Rainham; “I, too, think you are right.  I think I had much better have stayed—­very much better.”

“Ah, well,” he said, “you must take care of yourself, and give us a look in if you have time.”

Eve looked up at him, flushing a little, as though she found her brother’s formal politeness lacking in hospitality.  She was struck then, as she had not been yet during her visit, by a curious lassitude in her old friend’s face.  It affected her with an unconscious pity, causing her to second her brother’s somewhat chilly invitation more cordially.

The humour which had shone in Rainham’s eyes while they had been talking seemed to have gone out suddenly, like a lamp, leaving them blank and tired.  It shocked her to realize how old and ill he had become.

CHAPTER VI

Indolence and ill-health, in the opinion of many the salient points in Philip Rainham’s character, had left him at forty with little of the social habit.  The circle of his intimates had sensibly narrowed, and for the rest he was becoming more and more conscious that people whom one does not know exceedingly well are not worth knowing at all.  The process of dining out two or three times a week in the company of two or three persons whose claims on his attention were of the slenderest he found a process attended with less and less pleasure the older he grew.  There were few houses now which he frequented, and this year, when he had made an effort to devote a couple of evenings to the renewal of some acquaintance of the winter, and had discovered, as he had discovered anew each season, that the effort gave him no appreciable compensations for the disagreeables it involved, he made fresh resolutions of abstinence, and on the whole he kept them amazingly well.

For the most part, when he was not routed out by Lightmark (and since the young artist was in train to become a social acquisition this happened less frequently than of old), it was at Blackpool that he spent his evenings.  He had, it is true, a standing invitation to dinner at Lady Garnett’s when that old lady found herself at home; but Portman Square was remote, and evening dress, to a man with one lung in a climate which had so fickle a trick of registering itself either at the extreme top or bottom of the thermometer, presented various discomforts.  His den behind the office—­a little sitting-room with a bay-window facing Blackpool Reach, a room filled with books that had no relation to shipping, and hung round