Dis aliter visum—Fate decreed otherwise. Detached from the fortunes of Sarradet's Limited, rudely—indeed very rudely—repulsed from the threshold of theatrical venture, he had come back to his Legitimate Mistress. He knew her ways—her rebuffs, her neglect, her intolerable procrastination; but he had enjoyed just a taste of her favour and attractions too—of the interest and excitement, of the many-sided view of life, that she could give. Because of these, and also because of her high dignity and great traditions—things in which Sarradet's Limited and theatrical ventures seemed to him not so rich—he made up his mind to follow the beckoning of fate's finger and to stick to her, even though she half-starved him, and tried him to the extreme limit of his patience—after her ancient wont.
But his renewed allegiance was to be on terms; so at least he tried to pledge the future. He did not want his whole life and thought swallowed up. Here his own temperament had much to say, but his talks with Sir Christopher a good deal also. He would not be a sleuth-hound on the track of success (a Norton Ward, as he defined it to himself privily), nose to the ground, awake to that scent only, with no eyes for the world about him—or again, as it might be put, he would not have his life just a ladder, a climb up the steep side of a cliff, in hope of an eminence dizzy and uncertain enough even if he got there, and with a handsome probability of tumbling into the tomb half-way up. Could terms be made with the exacting Mistress about this? Really he did not know. So often she either refused all favours or stifled a man under the sheer weight of them. That was her way. Still, Sir Christopher had dodged it.
Suddenly he fell to laughing over the ridiculousness of these meditations. Afraid of too much work, when but for that dog he was briefless still! Could there be greater absurdity or grosser vanity? Yet the idea stuck—thanks perhaps to Sir Christopher—and under its apparent inanity possessed a solid basis. There was not only a career which he wished to run; there was a sort of man that he wanted to be, a man with broad interests and far-reaching sympathies, in full touch with the varieties of life, and not starved of its pleasures. Thus hazily, with smiles to mock his dreams, in that quiet hour he outlined the future of his choice, the manner of man that he would be.
The ringing of the telephone bell recalled him sharply to the present. With a last smiling "Rot!" muttered under his breath at himself, with a quick flash of hope that it was Wills and Mayne again, he went to answer the call. A strange voice with a foreign accent enquired his number, then asked if Mr. Arthur Lisle were in, and, on being told that it was that gentleman who was speaking, begged him to hold the line. The next moment another voice, not strange at all though it seemed long since he had heard it, asked, "Is that you, Cousin Arthur?"
"Yes, it's me," he answered, with a sudden twinge of excitement.
"I'm at the Lancaster—over here on business with the lawyers, just for a day or two. Oliver's in Paris. I want to see you about something, but I hardly hoped to find you in town. I thought you'd be at Hilsey. How lucky! Can you come and see me some time?"
"Yes, any time. I can come now, if you like. I'm doing nothing here."
A slight pause—Then—"Are you alone there, or is Frank Norton Ward there too?"
"There's absolutely nobody here but me."
"Then I think I'll come and see you. It's only a step. Will you look out for me?"