CHAPTER II.

Two or three minutes later, Wharton was walking down a side street
towards Piccadilly. After all the flattering incidents of the evening,
the chance meeting with which it concluded had jarred unpleasantly.
Confound the fellow! Was he the first man in the world who had been
thrown over by a girl because he had been discovered to be a tiresome
pedant? For even supposing Miss Boyce had described that little scene in
the library at Mellor to her _fiance_ at the moment of giving him his
dismissal--and the year before, by the help of all the news that reached
him about the broken engagement, by the help still more of the look, or
rather the entire absence of look wherewith Raeburn had walked past his
greeting and his outstretched hand in a corridor of the House, on the
first occasion of their meeting after the news had become public
property, Wharton was inclined to think she _had_--what then? No doubt
the stern moralist might have something to say on the subject of taking
advantage of a guest's position to tamper with another man's betrothed.
If so, the stern moralist would only show his usual incapacity to grasp
the actual facts of flesh and blood. What chance would he or any one
else have had with Marcella Boyce, if she had happened to be in love
with the man she had promised to marry? That little trifle had been left
out in the arrangement. It might have worked through perfectly well
without; as it happened it had broken down. _Realities_ had broken it
down. Small blame to them!

"I stood for _truth_!" he said to himself with a kind of rage--"that
moment when I held her in the library, she _lived_.--Raeburn offered her
a platform, a position; _I_ made her think, and feel. I helped her to
know herself. Our relation was not passion; it stood on the
threshold--but it was real--a true relation so far as it went. That it
went no farther was due again to circumstances--realities--of another
kind. That _he_ should scorn and resent my performance at Mellor is
natural enough. If we were in France he would call me out and I should
give him satisfaction with all the pleasure in life. But what am _I_
about? Are his ways mine? I should have nothing left but to shoot myself
to-morrow if they were!"

He walked on swiftly, angrily rating himself for those symptoms of a
merely false and conventional conscience which were apt to be roused in
him by contact with Aldous Raeburn.

"Has he not interfered with my freedom