It opened at once, and Loder stood before him.

The occasion was peculiar.  For a moment neither spoke; each involuntarily looked at the other with new eyes and under changed conditions.  Each had assumed a fresh stand-point in the other’s thought.  The passing astonishment, the half-impersonal curiosity that had previously tinged their relationship, was cast aside, never to be reassumed.  In each, the other saw himself —­and something more.

As usual, Loder was the first to recover himself.

“I was expecting you,” he said.  “Won’t you come in?”

The words were almost the same as his words of the night before, but his voice had a different ring; just as his face, when he drew back into the room, had a different expression—­a suggestion of decision and energy that had been lacking before.  Chilcote caught the difference as he crossed the threshold, and for a bare second a flicker of something like jealousy touched him.  But the sensation was fleeting.

“I have to thank you!” he said, holding out his hand.  He was too well bred to show by a hint that he understood the drop in the other’s principles.  But Loder broke down the artifice.

“Let’s be straight with each other, since everybody else has to be deceived,” he said, taking the other’s hand.  “You have nothing to thank me for, and you know it.  It’s a touch of the old Adam.  You tempted me, and I fell.”  He laughed, but below the laugh ran a note of something like triumph—­the curious triumph of a man who has known the tyranny of strength and suddenly appreciates the freedom of a weakness.

“You fully realize the thing you have proposed?” he added, in a different tone.  “It’s not too late to retract, even now.”

Chilcote opened his lips, paused, then laughed in imitation of his companion; but the laugh sounded forced.

“My dear fellow,” he said at last, “I never retract.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Then the bargain’s sealed.”

Loder walked slowly across the room, and, taking up his position by the mantel-piece, looked at his companion.  The similarity between them as they faced each other seemed abnormal, defying even the closest scrutiny.  And yet, so mysterious is Nature even in her lapses, they were subtly, indefinably different.  Chilcote was Loder deprived of one essential:  Loder, Chilcote with that essential bestowed.  The difference lay neither in feature, in coloring, nor in height, but in that baffling, illusive inner illumination that some call individuality, and others soul.

Something of this idea, misted and tangled by nervous imagination, crossed Chilcote’s mind in that moment of scrutiny, but he shrank from it apprehensively.

“I—­I came to discuss details,” he said, quickly, crossing the space that divided him from his host.  “Shall we—?  Are you—?” He paused uneasily.

“I’m entirely in your hands.”  Loder spoke with abrupt decision.  Moving to the table, he indicated a chair, and drew another forward for himself.