'I should like to ask you what the deuce you mean by even debating whether or no to accept that invitation when you know you've no earthly right to go near Miss Stanley—'
'You'd better mention your ideas to Mr Stanley. I don't in the least know what you're driving at—and I don't care; but since you choose to bring her name in, I shall throw over my other engagement and go to Morley's to-night.'
'You can go to the devil if you choose!' said Dick, who seemed to have entirely lost his self-control, and he flung out, slamming the door behind him.
Clare's note was bearing more fruit than she desired or anticipated in setting the brothers not so much against Litvinoff as against each other, for what but her letter could have stirred Dick's temper to this sudden and unpremeditated outbreak? What but her note and Dick's comments thereon could have ruffled Roland's ordinarily even nature in this way? It is always a mistake to play with fire; but people, girls especially, will not believe this until they have burned their own fingers, and, en passant, more of other people's valuables than they can ever estimate.
'I wish I had spoken to that girl yesterday,' said Count Litvinoff to himself; 'it would have saved my turning out this vile afternoon. If fate has given England freedom, she has taken care to accompany the gift with a fair share of fog. I wish I could help worrying about other people's troubles. It is very absurd, but I can't get on with my work for thinking of that poor tired little face. Hard up, she looked, too. Ah, well! so shall I be very soon, unless something very unexpected turns up. I'll go now, and earn an easy conscience for this evening.'
He threw down his pen and rose. The article on the Ethics of Revolution on which he was engaged had made but small progress that afternoon. He had felt ever since lunch that go out he must sooner or later, and the prospect was dispiriting. He glanced out of his window as he put on his fur-lined coat. From the windows of Morley's Hotel the view on a fine day is about as cheerful as any that London can present—though one may have one's private sentiments respecting the pepper-boxes which emphasise the bald ugliness of the National Gallery, and though one may sometimes wish that the slave of the lamp would bring St George's Hall from Liverpool and drop it on that splendid site. But this was not a fine day. It was a gloomy, damp, foggy, depressing, suicidal day. The fog had, with its usual adroitness, managed to hide the beauties of everything, and to magnify the uglinesses. Nelson was absolutely invisible, and the lions looked like half-drowned cats. Litvinoff shuddered as he lighted a large cigar and pulled his gloves on.
'This is a detestable climate,' he said, as he drew the first whiffs; 'but London is about the only place I know where good cigars can be had at a price to fit the pocket of an exile. I suppose I shall soon have to leave this palatial residence, and become one of the out-at-elbows gentlemen who make life hideous in Leicester Square and Soho.'
Like many men who have lived lonely lives, Michael Litvinoff had an inveterate habit of soliloquy. It had been strengthened by his life at the ancestral mansion on the Litvinoff estate, and had not grown less in his years of solitary wanderings.
His walk to-day was not a pleasant one, and more than once he felt inclined to turn back. But he persevered, and when he reached the house which he had seen her enter he asked a woman on the ground floor if Miss Hatfield lived there.