“I wonder if you could do what few men and fewer women are capable of?” he asked, at last.  “I wonder if you could learn to live in the present?” He lifted his head slowly and met her eyes.  “This is an—­an experiment,” he went on.  “And, like all experiments, it has good phases and bad.  When the bad phases come round I—­I want you to tell yourself that you are not altogether alone in your unhappiness—­that I am suffering too—­in another way.”

There was silence when he had spoken, and for a space it seemed that Eve would make no response.  Then the last surprise in a day of surprises came to him.  With a slight stir, a slight, quick rustle of skirts, she stepped forward and laid her hand in his.

The gesture was simple and very sweet; her eyes were soft and full of light as she raised her face to his, her lips parted in unconscious appeal.

There is no surrender so seductive as the surrender of a proud woman.  Loder’s blood stirred, the undeniable suggestion of the moment thrilled and disconcerted him in a tumult of thought.  Honor, duty, principle rose in a triple barrier; but honor, duty, and principle are but words to a headstrong man.  Tho full significance of his position came to him as it had never come before.  His hand closed on hers; he bent towards her, his pulses beating unevenly.

“Eve!” he said.  Then at sound of his voice he suddenly hesitated.  It was the voice of a man who has forgotten everything but his own existence.

For an instant he stayed motionless; then very quietly he drew away from her, releasing her hands.

“No,” he said.  “No—­I haven’t got the right,”

XVIII

That night, for almost the first time since he had adopted his dual role, Loder slept ill.  He was not a man over whom imagination held any powerful sway—­his doubts and misgivings seldom ran to speculation, upon future possibilities; nevertheless, the fact that, consciously or unconsciously, he had adopted a new attitude towards Eve came home to him with unpleasant force during the hours of darkness; and long before the first hint of daylight had slipped through the heavy window-curtains he had arranged a plan of action—­a plan wherein, by the simple method of altogether avoiding her, he might soothe his own conscience and safeguard Chilcote’s domestic interests.

It was a satisfactory if a somewhat negative arrangement, and he rose next morning with a feeling that things had begun to shape themselves.  But chance sometimes has a disconcerting knack of forestalling even our best-planned schemes.  He dressed slowly, and descended to his solitary breakfast with the pleasant sensation of having put last night out of consideration by the turning over of a new leaf; but scarcely had he opened Chilcote’s letters, scarcely had he taken a cursory glance at the morning’s newspaper, than it was borne in upon him that not only a new leaf, but a whole sheaf of new leaves, had been turned in his prospects—­by a hand infinitely more powerful and arbitrary than his own.  He realized within the space of a few moments that the leisure Eve might have claimed, the leisure he might have been tempted to devote to her, was no longer his to dispose of—­being already demanded of him from a quarter that allowed of no refusal.