Impelled by the desire, he leaned forward and opened the window.

“Let’s find the meaning of this,” he said.  “Is there nobody to regulate the traffic?” As he spoke he half rose and leaned out of the window.  There was a touch of imperious annoyance in his manner.  Fresh from the realization of power, there was something irksome in this commonplace check to his desires.

“Isn’t it possible to get out of this?” Eve heard him call to the coachman.  Then she heard no more.

He had leaned out of the carriage with the intention of looking onward towards the cause of the delay; instead, by that magnetic attraction that undoubtedly exists, he looked directly in front of him at the group of people waiting on the little island—­at one man who leaned against the lamp-post in an attitude of apathy—­a man with a pallid, unshaven face and lustreless eyes, who wore a cap drawn low over his forehead.

He looked at this man, and the man saw and returned his glance.  For a space that seemed interminable they held each other’s eyes; then very slowly Loder drew back into the carriage.

As he dropped into his seat, Eve glanced at him anxiously.

“John,” she said, “has anything happened?  You look ill.”

He turned to her and tried to smile.

“It’s nothing,” he said.  “Nothing to worry about.”  He spoke quickly, but his voice had suddenly become flat.  All the command, all the domination had dropped away from it.

Eve bent close to him, her face lighting up with anxious tenderness.  “It was the excitement,” she said, “the strain of tonight.”

He looked at her; but he made no attempt to press the fingers that clasped his own.

“Yes,” he said, slowly.  “Yes.  It was the excitement of to-night—­and the reaction.”

XXVI

The next morning at eight o’clock, and again without breakfast, Loder covered the distance between Grosvenor Square and Clifford’s Inn.  He left Chilcote’s house hastily—­with a haste that only an urgent motive could have driven him to adopt.  His steps were quick and uneven as he traversed the intervening streets; his shoulders lacked their decisive pose, and his pale face was marked with shadows beneath the eyes —­shadows that bore witness to the sleepless night spent in pacing Chilcote’s vast and lonely room.  By the curious effect of circumstances the likeness between the two men had never been more significantly marked than on that morning of April 19th, when Loder walked along the pavements crowded with early workers and brisk with insistent news-venders already alive to the value of last night’s political crisis.

The irony of this last element in the day’s concerns came to him fully when one newsboy, more energetic than his fellows, thrust a paper in front of him.

“Sensation in the ’Ouse, sir!  Speech by Mr. Chilcote!  Government defeat!”