you enjoyed your evening?" were the words he found himself saying, though they were far from those he had at heart. He felt that his smile was ghastly; but, as she seemed not to perceive it, he drew the conclusion that the ghastliness was within.
She answered languidly. "Yes, so so. It might have been pleasanter if it hadn't been for that awful man."
"Who? Young Davenant? I don't see anything awful about him."
"I dare say there isn't, really—in his place. He may be only prosy. However," she added, more brightly, "it doesn't matter for once. Good night, papa dear. You look tired. You ought to go to bed. I've seen to the windows in the drawing-room, but I haven't put out the lights."
Having kissed him and patted him on the cheek, she turned to go up the stairway. He allowed her to ascend a step or two. It was the minute to speak.
"I'm sorry you feel that way about young Davenant. I rather like him."
He had not chosen the words. They came out automatically. To discuss Davenant offered an excuse for detaining her, while postponing the blow for a few minutes more.
"Oh, men would," she said, indifferently, without turning round. "He's their style."
"Which is to his discredit?"
"Not to his discredit, but to his disadvantage. I've noticed that what they call a man's man is generally something of a bore."
"Davenant isn't a bore."
"Isn't he? Well, I really didn't notice in particular. I only remember that he used to be about here years ago—and I didn't like him. I suppose Drusilla has to be civil to him because he was Cousin Rodney's ward."
She had paused on the landing at the angle of the staircase.
"He's good-looking," Guion said, in continued effort to interpose the trivial between himself and what he had still to tell her.
"Oh, that sort of Saxon giant type is always good-looking. Of course. And dull too."
"I dare say he isn't as dull as you think."
"He might be that, and still remain pretty dull, after the allowances had been made. I know the type. It's awful—especially in the form of the American man of business."
"I'm an American man of business myself."
"Yes; by misadventure. You're the business man made, but not born. By nature you're a boulevardier, or what the newspapers call a 'clubman.' I admire you more than I can say—everybody admires you—for making such a success of a work that must always have been uncongenial at the least."
The opening was obvious. Nothing could have been more opportune. Two or three beginnings presented themselves, and as he hesitated, choosing between them, he moistened his lips and wiped the cold perspiration from his brow. After all, the blessed apathy within him was giving way and going to play him false! He had a minute of feeling as the condemned man must feel when he catches sight of the guillotine.
Before his parched tongue could formulate syllables she mounted another step or two of the staircase, and turned again, leaning on the banister and looking over. He noticed—by a common trick of the perceptive powers at crises of anguish—how the slender white pilasters, carved and twisted in sets of four, in the fashion of Georgian houses like Tory Hill, made quaint, graceful lines up and down the front of her black gown.
"It's really true—what I say about business, papa," she pursued. "I'm very much in earnest, and so is Rupert. I do wish you'd think of that place near Heneage. It will be so lovely for me to feel you're there; and there can't be any reason for your going on working any longer."
"No; there's no reason for that," he managed to say.
"Well then?" she demanded, with an air of triumph. "It's just as I said. You owe it to every one, you owe it to me, you owe it to yourself above all, to give up. It might have been better if you'd done it long ago."
"I couldn't," he declared, in a tone that sounded to his own ears as a cry. "I tried to, … but things were so involved … almost from the first. … "
"Well, as long as they're not involved now there's no reason why it shouldn't be better late than never."
"But they are involved now," he said, with an intensity so poignant that he was surprised she didn't notice it.
"Then straighten them out. Isn't that what we've been saying all along, Cousin Rodney and I? Take a partner; take two partners. Cousin Rodney says you should have done it when Mr. Maxwell died, or before—"
"I couldn't. … Things weren't shipshape enough … not even then."
"I'm sure it could be managed," she asserted, confidently; "and if you don't do it now, papa, when I'm being married and going away for good, you'll never do it at all. That's my fear. I don't want to live over there without you, papa; and I'm afraid that's what you're going to let me in for." She moved from the banister, and continued her way upward, speaking over her shoulder as she ascended. "In the mean time, you really must go to bed. You look tired and rather pale—just as I do after a dull party. Good night; and don't stay up."
She reached the floor above, and went toward her room. He felt strangled, speechless. There was a sense of terror too in the thought that his nerve, the nerve on which he had counted so much, was going to fail him.
"Olivia!"
His voice was so sharp that she hurried back to the top of the stairs.
"What is it, papa? Aren't you well?"
It was the sight of her face, anxious and suddenly white, peering down through the half-light of the hall that finally unmanned him. With a heart-sick feeling he turned away from the stairway.
"Yes; I'm all right. I only wanted you to know that … that … I shall be working rather late. You mustn't be disturbed … if you hear me moving about."
He would have upbraided himself more bitterly for his cowardice had he not found an excuse in the thought that, after all, there would be time in the morning. It was best that she should have the refreshment of the night. The one thing important was that she should not have the shock of learning from others on the morrow that he was not coming back—that he was going to Singville. Should he go there at all, he was determined to stay. Since he had no fight to put up, it was better that his going should be once for all. The thought of weeks, of months, perhaps, of quasi-freedom, during which he should be parading himself "on bail," was far more terrible to him than that of prison. He must prepare her for the beginning of his doom at all costs to himself; but, he reasoned, she would be more capable of taking the information calmly in the daylight of the morning than now, at a few minutes of midnight.
It was another short reprieve, enabling him to give all his attention to the tasks before him. If he was not to come back to Tory Hill he must leave his private papers there, his more intimate treasures, in good order. Certain things would have to be put away, others rearranged, others destroyed. For the most part they were in the library, the room he specially claimed as his own. Before setting himself to the work there he walked through some of the other rooms, turning out the lights.
In doing so he was consciously taking a farewell. He had been born in this house; in it he had spent his boyhood; to
