‘A visit signifies . . .’

‘Whatever it signifies!’

‘I’m thinking of the bit of annoyance.’

‘To me?  Anything appointed, finds me ready the next minute.’

Her smile was flatteringly bright.  ’By the way, keep your City people close about you:  entertain as much as possible; dine them,’ she said.

‘At home?’

’Better.  Sir Rodwell Blachington, Sir Abraham Quatley:  and their wives.  There’s no drawing back now.  And I will meet them.’

She received a compliment.  She was on the foot to go.

But she had forgotten the Tiddler mine.

The Tiddler mine was leisurely mounting.  Victor stated the figures; he saluted her hand, and Lady Grace passed out, with her heart on the top of them, and a buzz about it of the unexpected having occurred She had her experiences to match new patterns in events; though not very many.  Compared with gambling, the game of love was an idle entertainment.  Compared with other players, this man was gifted.

Victor went in to Mr. Inchling’s room, and kept Inchling from speaking, that he might admire him for he knew not what, or knew not well what.  The good fellow was devoted to his wife.  Victor in old days had called the wife Mrs. Grundy.  She gossiped, she was censorious; she knew—­could not but know—­the facts; yet never by a shade was she disrespectful.  He had a curious recollection of how his knowledge of Inchling and his wife being always in concert, entirely—­whatever they might think in private —­devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it had not originally sprung, his resolve to cast off the pestilential cloak of obscurity shortening his days, and emerge before a world he could illumine to give him back splendid reflections.  Inchling and his wife, it was:  because the two were one:  and if one, and subservient to him, knowing all the story, why, it foreshadowed a conquered world.

They were the one pulse of the married Grundy beating in his hand.  So it had been.

He rattled his views upon Indian business, to hold Inchling silent, and let his mind dwell almost lovingly on the good faithful spouse, who had no phosphorescent writing of a recent throbbing event on the four walls of his room.

Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.

He felt and regretted this.  He greeted her with a doubled affectionateness.  Her pitiable deficiency of courage, excusing a man for this and that small matter in the thick of the conflict, made demands on him for gentle treatment.

‘You have not seen any one?’ she asked.

‘City people.  And you, my love?’

’Mr. Barmby called.  He has gone down to Tunbridge Wells for a week, to some friend there.’  She added, in pain of thought:  ’I have seen Dartrey.  He has brought Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects he will have to take him to Brighton.’