Crawleigh Abbey and carried his wife and daughter to Charing
Cross with a relentlessness and speed which gave their departure the
appearance of an abduction. The pleurisy developed four days after
Christmas, and Eric had not seen Barbara since the night of their
sick-room dinner. A week after they reached the Riviera, he heard a
story, traced without difficulty to Gerald Deganway, that Lord Crawleigh
had spirited Barbara away from the danger of a _mesalliance_. But, in
wrestling with the necessary evils of life, Eric was finding, as others
had done before him, that Gerald Deganway was the irreducible minimum;
it was of greater importance that for three months no one would have
cause to gossip about them; and by that time even the Warings could not
reasonably hope for tidings of Jack.

Her departure cleared Eric's mind of its last misgivings and convinced
him that Barbara was no longer a casually pleasant companion but an
urgently needed wife. In her absence, he was thrown back on the bachelor
society of the Thespian Club, though with every meal that he ate there
came a growing dread that he would be absorbed into it until younger
generations, watching him as he pored over the day's bill of fare with
his cronies or grew petulant with the servants, came to regard him as
part of the club's furniture--as part of every club's furniture--wifeless,
childless, friendless and uninterested, a bore who had outstayed the
welcome and even the toleration of a community founded to keep his like
from utter loneliness. Sometimes, as he looked at the men who would
never marry, he wondered what would become of him if Jack Waring
appeared suddenly, if Barbara fell in love with some one else, if she
fell out of love as quickly as she had fallen in love. . . .

At the end of March a telegram from Folkestone announced her return and
invited him to dine with her.

Eric walked up the familiar stairs, with the august butler, at whose nod
or frown he had once trembled, turning at intervals to impart
confidences from the advantageous height of an advance stair. ("We" had
only come back the day before and were, on the whole, better for the
change. He was afraid her ladyship would hardly be dressed yet. . . . If
Mr. Lane did not mind waiting a moment. . . . There was the evening
paper. . . .) Eric settled himself with a comfortable sense of
home-coming, his eyes on Barbara's bedroom door, wondering how she would
greet him. Their last dinner togeth