“I wish we hadn’t,” she said.  “Don’t you see it was only my sorcery, as you call it, that took us there?  I meant us to go.”

At last we reached Cadogan Gardens.  I descended and handed her out, and we entered the hall of the mansions.  The porter stood with the lift-door open.

“I’m coming up to knock all this foolishness out of your head.”

“No, don’t, please, for Heaven’s sake!” she whispered imploringly.  “I must be alone—­to think it all out.  It’s only because I love you so.  And don’t come to see me for a day or two—­say two days.  This is Wednesday.  Come on Friday.  You think it over as well.  And if it’s really true—­I’ll know then—­when you come.  Good-bye, dear.  Make Gray drive you wherever you want to go.”

She wrung my hand, turned and entered the lift.  The gates swung to and she mounted out of sight.  I went slowly back to the brougham, and gave the chauffeur the address of my eyrie.  He touched his hat.  I got in and we drove off.  And then, for the first time, it struck me that an about-to-be-shabby gentleman with a beggarly two hundred a year, ought not, in spite of his quarterings, to be contemplating marriage with a wealthy woman who kept an electric brougham.  The thought hit me like a stone in the midriff.

What on earth was to be done?  My pride rose up like the deux ex machina in the melodrama and forbade the banns.  To live on Lola’s money—­the idea was intolerable.  Equally intolerable was the idea of earning an income by means against the honesty of which my soul clamoured aloud.

“Good God!” I cried.  “Is life, now I’ve got to it, nothing but an infinite series of dilemmas?  No sooner am I off one than I’m on another.  No sooner do I find that Lola and not Eleanor Faversham is the woman sent down by Heaven to be my mate than I realise the same old dilemma—­Lola on one horn and Eleanor replaced on the other by Pride and Honour and all sorts of capital-lettered considerations.  Life is the very Deuce,” said I, with a wry appreciation of the subtlety of language.

Why did Lola say:  “Your Eleanor Faversham?”

I had enough to think over for the rest of the evening.  But I slept peacefully.  Light loves had come and gone in the days past; but now for the first time love that was not light had come into my life.

CHAPTER XXI

“The Lord will find a way out of the dilemma,” said I confidently to myself as I neared Cadogan Gardens two days after the revelatory drive.  “Lola is in love with me and I am in love with Lola, and there is nothing to keep us apart but my pride over a matter of a few ha’-pence.”  I felt peculiarly jaunty.  I had just posted to Finch the last of the articles I had agreed to write for his reactionary review, and only a couple of articles for another journal remained to be written in order to complete my literary engagements.  Soon I should