A man may still afford to dwell on the charms and merits of his heart’s mistress while he has ten minutes to spare.  The dropping minutes, however, detract one by one from her individuality and threaten to sink her in her sex entirely.  It is the inexorable clock that says she is as other women.  Dacier began to chafe.  He was unaccustomed to the part he was performing:—­and if she failed him?  She would not.  She would be late, though.  No, she was in time!  His long legs crossed the platform to overtake a tall lady veiled and dressed in black.  He lifted his hat; he heard an alarmed little cry and retired.  The clock said, Five minutes:  a secret chiromancy in addition indicating on its face the word Fool.  An odd word to be cast at him!  It rocked the icy pillar of pride in the background of his nature.  Certainly standing solos at the hour of eight P.M., he would stand for a fool.  Hitherto he had never allowed a woman to chance to posture him in that character.  He strode out, returned, scanned every lady’s shape, and for a distraction watched the veiled lady whom he had accosted.  Her figure suggested pleasant features.  Either she was disappointed or she was an adept.  At the shutting of the gates she glided through, not without a fearful look around and at him.  She disappeared.  Dacier shrugged.  His novel assimilation to the rat-rabble of amatory intriguers tapped him on the shoulder unpleasantly.  A luckless member of the fraternity too!  The bell, the clock and the train gave him his title.  ‘And I was ready to fling down everything for the woman!’ The trial of a superb London gentleman’s resources in the love-passion could not have been much keener.  No sign of her.

He who stands ready to defy the world, and is baffled by the absence of his fair assistant, is the fool doubled, so completely the fool that he heads the universal shout; he does not spare himself.  The sole consolation he has is to revile the sex.  Women! women!  Whom have they not made a fool of!  His uncle as much as any—­and professing to know them.  Him also! the man proud of escaping their wiles.  ‘For this woman . . . !’ he went on saying after he had lost sight of her in her sex’s trickeries.  The nearest he could get to her was to conceive that the arrant coquette was now laughing at her utter subjugation and befooling of the man popularly supposed invincible.  If it were known of him!  The idea of his being a puppet fixed for derision was madly distempering.  He had only to ask the affirmative of Constance Asper to-morrow!  A vision of his determination to do it, somewhat comforted him.

Dacier walked up and down the platform, passing his pile of luggage, solitary and eloquent on the barrow.  Never in his life having been made to look a fool, he felt the red heat of the thing, as a man who has not blessedly become acquainted with the swish in boyhood finds his untempered blood turn to poison at a blow; he cannot healthily take a licking.  But then it had been so splendid an insanity when he urged Diana to fly with him.  Any one but a woman would have appreciated the sacrifice.