Abandoning the club, he walked slowly along the railings of Piccadilly towards home, that house in Bury Street, St. James’s, which had been his London abode since he was quite young—­one of the few in the street that had been left untouched by the general passion for puffing down and building up, which had spoiled half London in his opinion.

A man, more silent than anything on earth, with the soft, quick, dark eyes of a woodcock and a long, greenish, knitted waistcoat, black cutaway, and tight trousers strapped over his boots, opened the door.

“I shan’t go out again, Markey.  Mrs. Markey must give me some dinner.  Anything’ll do.”

Markey signalled that he had heard, and those brown eyes under eyebrows meeting and forming one long, dark line, took his master in from head to heel.  He had already nodded last night, when his wife had said the gov’nor would take it hard.  Retiring to the back premises, he jerked his head toward the street and made a motion upward with his hand, by which Mrs. Markey, an astute woman, understood that she had to go out and shop because the gov’nor was dining in.  When she had gone, Markey sat down opposite Betty, Gyp’s old nurse.  The stout woman was still crying in a quiet way.  It gave him the fair hump, for he felt inclined to howl like a dog himself.  After watching her broad, rosy, tearful face in silence for some minutes, he shook his head, and, with a gulp and a tremor of her comfortable body, Betty desisted.  One paid attention to Markey.

Winton went first into his daughter’s bedroom, and gazed at its emptied silken order, its deserted silver mirror, twisting viciously at his little moustache.  Then, in his sanctum, he sat down before the fire, without turning up the light.  Anyone looking in, would have thought he was asleep; but the drowsy influence of that deep chair and cosy fire had drawn him back into the long-ago.  What unhappy chance had made him pass her house to-day!

Some say there is no such thing as an affinity, no case—­of a man, at least—­made bankrupt of passion by a single love.  In theory, it may be so; in fact, there are such men—­neck-or-nothing men, quiet and self-contained, the last to expect that nature will play them such a trick, the last to desire such surrender of themselves, the last to know when their fate is on them.  Who could have seemed to himself, and, indeed, to others, less likely than Charles Clare Winton to fall over head and ears in love when he stepped into the Belvoir Hunt ballroom at Grantham that December evening, twenty-four years ago?  A keen soldier, a dandy, a first-rate man to hounds, already almost a proverb in his regiment for coolness and for a sort of courteous disregard of women as among the minor things of life—­he had stood there by the door, in no hurry to dance, taking a survey with an air that just did not give an impression of “side” because it was not at all put on.  And—­behold!—­She