A light, like the sun, broke over the gloomy and rather haggard face of Rudyard Byng, and humour shot up into his eyes.  He gave a low, generous laugh, as he said with a twinkle:  “And whether he does it at some expense to himself—­with his own overcoat, or with some one else’s cloak.  Is that what you want to say?”

All at once the personal element, so powerful in most of us—­even in moments when interests are in existence so great that they should obliterate all others—­came to the surface.  For a moment it almost made Byng forget the crisis which had come to a land where he had done all that was worth doing, so far in his life; which had burned itself into his very soul; which drew him, sleeping or waking, into its arms of memory and longing.

He had read only one paper that morning, and it—­the latest attempt at sensational journalism—­had so made him blush at the flattering references to himself in relation to the incident at the opera, that he had opened no other.  He had left his chambers to avoid the telegrams and notes of congratulation which were arriving in great numbers.  He had gone for his morning ride in Battersea Park instead of the Row to escape observation; had afterwards spent two hours at the house he was building in Park Lane; had then come to the club, where he had encountered Ian Stafford and had heard the news which overwhelmed him.

“Well, an opera cloak did the work better than an overcoat would have done,” Stafford answered, laughing.  “It was a flash of real genius to think of it.  You did think it all out in the second, didn’t you?”

Stafford looked at him curiously, for he wondered if the choice of a soft cloak which could more easily be wrapped round the burning woman than an overcoat was accidental, or whether it was the product of a mind of unusual decision.

Byng puffed out a great cloud of smoke and laughed again quietly as he replied: 

“Well, I’ve had a good deal of lion and rhinoceros shooting in my time, and I’ve had to make up my mind pretty quick now and then; so I suppose it gets to be a habit.  You don’t stop to think when the trouble’s on you; you think as you go.  If I’d stopped to think, I’d have funked the whole thing, I suppose—­jumping from that box onto the stage, and grabbing a lady in my arms, all in the open, as it were.  But that wouldn’t have been the natural man.  The natural man that’s in most of us, even when we’re not very clever, does things right.  It’s when the conventional man comes in and says, Let us consider, that we go wrong.  By Jingo, Al’mah was as near having her beauty spoiled as any woman ever was; but she’s only got a few nasty burns on the arm and has singed her hair a little.”

“You’ve seen her to-day, then?”