It did not matter so much that London was changing fast.  The old clock on the tower of St. James’s would still give the time to his step as he went to and from the Foreign Office, and there were quiet places like Kensington Gardens where the bounding person would never think to stray.  Indeed, they never strayed; they only rushed and pushed where their spreading tails could be seen by the multitude.  They never got farther west than Rotten Row, which was in possession of three classes of people—­those who sat in Parliament, those who had seats on the Stock Exchange, and those who could not sit their horses.  Three years had not done it all, but it had done a good deal; and he was more keenly alive to the changes and developments which had begun long before he left and had increased vastly since.  Wealth was more and more the master of England—­new-made wealth; and some of it was too ostentatious and too pretentious to condone, much less indulge.

All at once his eye, roaming down the columns, came upon the following announcement: 

“Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Byng have returned to town from Scotland for a few days, before proceeding to Wales, where they are presently to receive at Glencader Castle the Duke and Duchess of Sheffield, the Prince and Princess of Cleaves, M. Santon, the French Foreign Minister, the Slavonian Ambassador, the Earl and Countess of Tynemouth, and Mr. Tudor Tempest.”

“‘And Mr. Tudor Tempest,’” Ian repeated to himself.  “Well, she would.  She would pay that much tribute to her own genius.  Four-fifths to the claims of the body and the social nervous system, and one-fifth to the desire of the soul.  Tempest is a literary genius by what he has done, and she is a genius by nature, and with so much left undone.  The Slavonian Ambassador—­him, and the French Foreign Minister!  That looks like a useful combination at this moment—­at this moment.  She has a gift for combinations, a wonderful skill, a still more wonderful perception—­and a remarkable unscrupulousness.  She’s the naturally ablest woman I have ever known; but she wants to take short-cuts to a worldly Elysium, and it can’t be done, not even with three times three millions—­and three millions was her price.”

Suddenly he got up and went over to a table where were several dispatch-boxes.  Opening one, he drew forth from the bottom, where he had placed it nearly three years ago, a letter.  He looked at the long, sliding handwriting, so graceful and fine, he caught the perfume which had intoxicated Rudyard Byng, and, stooping down, he sniffed the dispatch-box.  He nodded.

“She’s pervasive in everything,” he murmured.  He turned over several other packets of letters in the box.  “I apologize,” he said, ironically, to these letters.  “I ought to have banished her long ago, but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t realize how much she’d influence everything—­even in a box.”  He laughed cynically, and slowly opened the one letter which had meant so much to him.