CHAPTER II

While Janet Tosswill was thinking so intently of Godfrey Radmore, he himself was standing at the window of a big bedroom in one of those musty, expensive, old-fashioned hotels, which, perhaps because they are within a stone’s throw of Piccadilly, still have faithful patrons all the year round, and are full to bursting during the London Season.  As to Radmore, he had chosen it because it was the place where the grandfather who had brought him up always stayed when he, Godfrey, was a little boy.

Tall, well-built after the loose-limbed English fashion, and with a dark, intelligent, rather grim cast of face, Radmore looked older than his age, which was thirty-two.  Yet, for all that, there was an air of power and of reserved strength about him that set him apart from his fellows, and a casual observer would have believed him cold, and perhaps a thought calculating, in nature.

Yet, standing there, looking out on that quiet, narrow street, he was seething with varying emotions in which he was, in a sense, luxuriating, though whether he would have admitted any living being to a share in them was another matter.

Home!  Home at last for good!—­after what had been, with two short breaks, a nine years’ absence from England, and from all that England stands for to such a man.

He had left his country in 1910, an angry, embittered lad of twenty-three, believing that he would never come back or, at any rate, not till he was an old man having “made good.”

But everything—­everything had fallen out absolutely differently from what he had expected it to do.  The influence of Mars, so fatal to millions of his fellow beings, had brought him marvellous, unmerited good fortune.  He had rushed home the moment War was declared, and after putting in some time in a training which he hated to remember, he had at last obtained a commission.  Within a fortnight of having reached his Mecca—­the Front, he was back in England in the—­to him—­amazing guise of wounded hero.  But he had sent for none of his old friends for he was still ashamed.  After the Armistice he had rushed through England on his way to Australia, putting in a few days with a Colonel and Mrs. Crofton, with whom he had been thrown in Egypt.  More to do his host a kindness than for any other reason, Radmore had sent his godson, Timothy Tosswill, a pedigree puppy, from the queer little Essex manor-house where the Croftons were then making a rather futile attempt to increase their slender means by breeding terriers.

The days had slipped by there very pleasantly, for Radmore liked his taciturn host, and Mrs. Crofton was very pretty—­an agreeable playfellow for a rich and lonely man.  So it was that when it came to the point he had not cared to look up any of the people associated with his early youth.

But now he was going to see them—­almost had he forced himself upon them.  And the thought of going home to Old Place shook and stirred him to the heart.