At the touch of his hand, at the spontaneous approval of his first words, Loder’s pride thrilled, and in a vehement rush of ambition his senses answered to the praise.  Then, as Fraide in all unconsciousness added his second sentence, the hot glow of feeling suddenly chilled.  In a sweep of intuitive reaction the meaning and the danger of his falsely real position extinguished his excitement and turned his triumph cold.  With an involuntary gesture he withdrew his arm.

“You’re very good, sir,” he said.  “And you’re very right.  We never should forget that there is—­a future.”

The old man glanced up, surprised by the tone.

“Quite so, Chilcote,” he said, kindly.  “But we only advise those in whom we believe to look towards it.  Shall we find my wife?  I know she will want to bear you home with us.”

But Loder’s joy in himself and his achievement had dropped from him.  He shrank suddenly from Lady Sarah’s congratulations and Eve’s warm, silent approbation.

“Thanks, sir,” he said, “but I don’t feel fit for society.  A touch of my—­nerves, I suppose.”  He laughed shortly.  “But do you mind saying to Eve that I hope I have—­satisfied her?” he added this as if in half-reluctant after-thought.  Then, with a short pressure of Fraide’s hand, he turned, evading the many groups that waited to claim him, and passed out of the House alone.

Hailing a cab, he drove to Grosvenor Square.  All the exaltation of an hour ago had turned to ashes.  His excitement had found its culmination in a sense of futility and premonition.

He met no one in the hall or on the stairs of Chilcote’s house, and on entering the study he found that also deserted.  Greening had been among the most absorbed of those who had listened to his speech.  Passing at once into the room, he crossed as if by instinct to the desk, and there halted.  On the top of some unopened letters lay the significant yellow envelope of a telegram—­the telegram that in an unformed, subconscious way had sprung to his expectation on the moment of Fraide’s congratulation.

Very quietly he picked it up, opened and read it, and, with the automatic caution that had become habitual, carried it across the room and dropped it in the fire.  This done, he returned to the desk, read the letters that awaited Chilcote, and, scribbling the necessary notes upon the margins, left them in readiness for Greening.  Then, moving with the same quiet suppression, he passed from the room, down the stairs, and out into the street by the way he had come.

XX

On the fifth day after the momentous 1st of April on which he had recalled Loder and resumed his own life Chilcote left his house and walked towards Bond Street.  Though the morning was clear and the air almost warm for the time of year, he was buttoned into a long overcoat and was wearing a muffler and a pair of doeskin gloves.  As he passed along the street he kept close to the house fronts to avoid the sun that was everywhere stirring the winterbound town, like a suffusion of young blood through old veins.  He avoided the warmth because in this instance warmth meant light, but as he moved he shivered slightly from time to time with the haunting, permeating cold that of late had become his persistent shadow.