For a moment Eve waited.  She looked at him in silence; and in that silence he read in her eyes the reflection of his own expression.

“And you?” she asked, in a suppressed voice.  “What answer did you give?”

He watched her for an instant, taking a strange pleasure in her flushed face and brilliantly eager eyes; then the joy of conscious strength, the sense of opportunity regained, swept all other considerations out of sight.

“I accepted,” he said, quickly.  “Could any man who was merely human have done otherwise?”

That was Loder’s attitude and action on the night of his jeopardy and his success, and the following day found his mood unchanged.  He was one of those rare individuals who never give a promise overnight and regret it in the morning.  He was slow to move, but when he did the movement brushed all obstacles aside.  In the first days of his usurpation he had gone cautiously, half fascinated, half distrustful; then the reality, the extraordinary tangibility of the position had gripped him when, matching himself for the first time with men of his own caliber, he had learned his real weight on the day of his protest against the Easter adjournment.  With that knowledge had been born the dominant factor in his whole scheme—­the overwhelming, insistent desire to manifest his power.  That desire that is the salvation or the ruin of every strong man who has once realized his strength.  Supremacy was the note to which his ambition reached.  To trample out Chilcote’s footmarks with his own had been his tacit instinct from the first; now it rose paramount.  It was the whole theory of creation—­the survival of the fittest—­the deep, egotistical certainty that he was the better man.

And it was with this conviction that he entered on the vital period of his dual career.  The imminent crisis, and his own share in it, absorbed him absolutely.

In the weeks that followed his answer to Fraide’s proposal he gave himself ungrudgingly to his work.  He wrote, read, and planned with tireless energy; he frequently forgot to eat, and slept only through sheer exhaustion; in the fullest sense of the word he lived for the culminating hour that was to bring him failure or success.

He seldom left Grosvenor Square in the days that followed, except to confer with his party.  All his interest, all his relaxation even, lay in his work and what pertained to it.  His strength was like a solid wall, his intelligence was sharp and keen as steel.  The moment was his; and by sheer mastery of will he put other considerations out of sight.  He forgot Chilcote and forgot Lillian—­not because they escaped his memory, but because he chose to shut them from it.

Of Eve he saw but little in this time of high pressure.  When a man touches the core of his capacities, puts his best into the work that in his eyes stands paramount, there is little place for, and no need of, woman.  She comes before—­and after.  She inspires, compensates, or completes; but the achievement, the creation, is man’s alone.  And all true women understand and yield to this unspoken precept.