Taking his glass from the table, he held it away from him to scrutinize the colour; thirsty as he was, it was not likely that he was going to drink trash!  Then, placing it to his lips, he took a sip.

“A very nice wine,” he said at last, passing it before his nose; “not the equal of my Heidsieck!”

It was at this moment that the idea came to him which he afterwards imparted at Timothy’s in this nutshell:  “I shouldn’t wonder a bit if that architect chap were sweet upon Mrs. Soames!”

And from this moment his pale, round eyes never ceased to bulge with the interest of his discovery.

“The fellow,” he said to Mrs. Septimus, “follows her about with his eyes like a dog—­the bumpy beggar!  I don’t wonder at it—­she’s a very charming woman, and, I should say, the pink of discretion!” A vague consciousness of perfume caging about Irene, like that from a flower with half-closed petals and a passionate heart, moved him to the creation of this image.  “But I wasn’t sure of it,” he said, “till I saw him pick up her handkerchief.”

Mrs. Small’s eyes boiled with excitement.

“And did he give it her back?” she asked.

“Give it back?” said Swithin:  “I saw him slobber on it when he thought I wasn’t looking!”

Mrs. Small gasped—­too interested to speak.

“But she gave him no encouragement,” went on Swithin; he stopped, and stared for a minute or two in the way that alarmed Aunt Hester so—­he had suddenly recollected that, as they were starting back in the phaeton, she had given Bosinney her hand a second time, and let it stay there too....  He had touched his horses smartly with the whip, anxious to get her all to himself.  But she had looked back, and she had not answered his first question; neither had he been able to see her face—­she had kept it hanging down.

There is somewhere a picture, which Swithin has not seen, of a man sitting on a rock, and by him, immersed in the still, green water, a sea-nymph lying on her back, with her hand on her naked breast.  She has a half-smile on her face—­a smile of hopeless surrender and of secret joy.

Seated by Swithin’s side, Irene may have been smiling like that.

When, warmed by champagne, he had her all to himself, he unbosomed himself of his wrongs; of his smothered resentment against the new chef at the club; his worry over the house in Wigmore Street, where the rascally tenant had gone bankrupt through helping his brother-in-law as if charity did not begin at home; of his deafness, too, and that pain he sometimes got in his right side.  She listened, her eyes swimming under their lids.  He thought she was thinking deeply of his troubles, and pitied himself terribly.  Yet in his fur coat, with frogs across the breast, his top hat aslant, driving this beautiful woman, he had never felt more distinguished.