me
plan. The day was breaking when his plan came to him.

CHAPTER XV

The next morning Drake's seat at the breakfast table was empty.

'He caught the early train from Bentbridge,' Captain Le Mesurier
explained. 'Business, I suppose. He told me last thing yesterday night
that he had to go.'

Clarice coloured and lowered her eyes to her plate. Mallinson noticed her
embarrassment, and took it for evidence of some secret understanding
between her and Drake. He became yet more firmly resolved to put his idea
into action.

'You are not in a hurry,' said Captain Le Mesurier. 'You had better stay
the week out.'

Mallinson saw his wife raise her head quickly as though she was about to
object, and immediately accepted the invitation. Parliament would not
meet for three weeks, he reckoned, since there were still the county
members to be elected.

Clarice spent the week in defining the relationship in which she and
Drake were henceforth to stand towards each other. They were to be
animated by a stern spirit of duty,--by the same spirit, in fact, which
had compelled Drake to court-martial Gorley in Africa, and subsequently
to detail the episode to her. Duty was to keep them apart. She came to
think of duty as a row of footlights across which they could from time to
time look into each other's eyes.

Clarice felt that there was something very reassuring and protective in
this notion of duty. It justified her in buying a copy of _Frou-Frou_,
which lay upon the bookstall at Bentbridge railway station, and in
studying it continuously all the way from Bentbridge to London. She was
impelled to purchase it by a recollection that Drake had first been
introduced to her at a performance of that play, and his criticisms
returned to her thoughts as she read the dialogue. The play had seemed
true to him, the disaster inevitable--given the particular characters,
and she bore the qualification particularly in mind. There was a
difference between _Frou-Frou_ and a woman animated by a sense of duty; a
difference of kind, rather than of degree. Sidney Mallinson remarked the
book which she was reading, but he made no comment whatsoever.

The next morning he paid a long call upon the editor of the _Meteor_.

Meanwhile, Drake was devoting himself to the business of the Matanga
Company, with an assiduity unusual even for him. Fielding discovered that
he seldom left the city before ten at night, and felt it incumbent to
expostulate wi