‘So he called there to-day?  I wonder whether he stayed long?’

‘I will let you know to-morrow.’

On the morrow Richard learnt that Hubert Eldon had been refused admittance.  The information gave him pleasure.  Yet all through the night he had been earnestly hoping that he might hear something quite different, had tried to see in Eldon’s visit a possible salvation for himself.  For the struggle which occupied him more and more had by this time declared its issues plainly enough; daily the temptation became stronger, the resources of honour more feeble.  In the beginning he had only played with dangerous thoughts; to break faith with Emma Vine had appeared an impossibility, and a marriage such as his fancy substituted, the most improbable of things.  But in men of Richard’s stamp that which allures the fancy will, if circumstances give but a little encouragement, soon take hold upon the planning brain.  His acquaintance with the Walthams had ripened to intimacy, and custom nourished his self-confidence; moreover, he could not misunderstand the all but direct encouragement which on one or two recent occasions he had received from Mrs. Waltham.  That lady had begun to talk to him, when they were alone together, in almost a motherly way, confiding to him this or that peculiarity in the characters of her children, deploring her inability to give Adela the pleasures suitable to her age, then again pointing out the advantage it was to a girl to have all her thoughts centred in home.

‘I can truly say,’ remarked Mrs. Waltham in the course of the latest such conversation, ’that Adela has never given me an hour’s serious uneasiness.  The dear child has, I believe, no will apart from her desire to please me.  Her instincts are so beautifully submissive.’

To a man situated like Mutimer this tone is fatal.  In truth it seemed to make offer to him of what he supremely desired.  No such encouragement had come from Adela herself, but that meant nothing either way; Richard had already perceived that maidenly reserve was a far more complex matter in a girl of gentle breeding, than in those with whom he had formerly associated; for all he knew, increase of distance in manner might represent the very hope that he was seeking.  That hope he sought, in all save the hours when conscience lorded over silence, with a reality of desire such as he had never known.  Perhaps it was not Adela, and Adela alone, that inspired this passion; it was a new ideal of the feminine addressing itself to his instincts.  Adela had the field to herself, and did indeed embody in almost an ideal degree the fine essence of distinctly feminine qualities which appeal most strongly to the masculine mind.  Mutimer was not capable of love in the highest sense; he was not, again, endowed with strong appetite; but his nature contained possibilities of refinement which, in a situation like the present, constituted motive force the same in its effects as either form of passion.