For a moment their eyes met, then abruptly Loder looked away.  She had gauged his intentions incorrectly, yet with disconcerting insight.  Again the suggestion of an unusual personality below the serenity of her manner recurred to his imagination.

With an impulse altogether foreign to him he lifted his head and again met her glance.  Then at last he spoke, but only two words.  “Forgive me!” he said, with simple, direct sincerity.

XXII

After his interview with Eve, Loder retired to the study and spent the remaining hours of the day and the whole span of the evening in work.  At one o’clock, still feeling fresh in mind and body, he dismissed Greening and passed into Chilcote’s bedroom.  The interview with Eve, though widely different from the one he had anticipated, had left him stimulated and alert.  In the hours that followed it there had been an added anxiety to put his mind into harness, an added gratification in finding it answer to the rein.

A pleasant sense of retrospection settled upon him as he slowly undressed; and a pleasant sense of interest touched him as, crossing to the dressing-table, he caught sight of Chilcote’s engagement-book—­taken with other things from the suit he had changed at dinner-time and carefully laid aside by Renwick.

He picked it up and slowly turned the pages.  It always held the suggestion of a lottery—­this dipping into another man’s engagements and drawing a prize or a blank.  It was a sensation that even custom had not dulled.

At first he turned the pages slowly, then by degrees his fingers quickened.  Beyond the fact that this present evening was free, he knew nothing of his promised movements.  The abruptness of Chilcote’s arrival at Clifford’s Inn in the afternoon had left no time for superfluous questions.  He skimmed the writing with a touch of interested haste, then all at once he paused and smiled.

“Big enough for a tombstone!” he said below his breath as his eyes rested on a large blue cross.  Then he smiled again and held the book to the light.

“Dine 33 Cadogan Gardens, 8 o’c.  Talk with L,” he read, still speaking softly to himself.

He stood for a moment pondering on the entry, then once more his glance reverted to the cross.

“Evidently meant it to be seen,” he mused; “but why the deuce isn’t he more explicit?” As he spoke, a look of comprehension suddenly crossed his face and the puzzled frown between his eyebrows cleared away.

With a feeling of satisfaction he remembered Lakely’s frequent and pressing suggestion that he should dine with him at Cadogan Gardens and discuss the political outlook.

Lakely must have written during his absence, and Chilcote, having marked the engagement, felt no further responsibility.  The invitation could scarcely have been verbal, as Chilcote, he knew, had lain very low in the five days of his return home.