to find Stamfordham continuing--

"But I am willing for your sake to stop here."

Rendel tried to make some acknowledgment, but no words that he could
speak came to his lips.

"It might, as I told you before," Stamfordham went on, standing up as
though to show that the interview was over, "have been a national
disaster. That, however, has, I hope, been averted, and we shall simply
have done now something we meant to do a few days hence. But that does
not affect the point we have been discussing," and he looked at Rendel
as though with a forlorn hope that at the last moment he might speak.
But Rendel was silent still. "You understand, then," Stamfordham said,
looking him straight in the face, an embodiment of inexorable justice,
"what this means to a man in your position?"

"Yes," said Rendel again.

"I owe my colleagues an explanation," said Stamfordham. "Since one is
not to be had, I must repeat to them what has passed between us."

"Of course," said Rendel. And he went towards the door.

"There is another thing I must ask you," Stamfordham said, speaking with
cold courtesy. "I have a letter here about Stoke Newton. It will have to
be settled." And he waited for Rendel to answer the question which had
not been explicitly asked.

"I shall not stand," said Rendel.

"That is best," said Stamfordham quietly. "Will you telegraph to the
Committee, then?"

"I will," said Rendel, and with an inclination of the head, to which
Lord Stamfordham responded, he went out.

CHAPTER XVIII

Rendel up to this moment had been accustomed, unconsciously to himself
perhaps, to live, as most men of keen intelligence and aspirations do
live, in the future. The possibilities of to-day had always had an added
zest from the sense of there being a long, magnificent expanse
stretching away indefinitely in front of him, in which to achieve what
he would. In his moments of despondency he had been able to conceive
disaster possible, but it was always, after all, such disaster as a man
might encounter, and then, surmounting, turn afresh to life. But of all
possible forms of disaster that would have occurred to him as being
likely to come near himself, there was one that he would have known
could not approach him: there was one form of misery from which, so far
as human probabilities could be gauged, he was safe. He had never
imagined that he could in his own experience learn what it meant,
according to the customary phrase, to "