This done, he proceeded with the ordinary routine of his daily life. Such men as this are case-hardened. They carry with them a conscience like the floor of an Augean stable, but they know how to walk thereon. Moreover, he was one of those who assign to their dealings with men quite a different code of morals to that reserved for women. His was the code of “not being found out.” Men are more suspicious—they find out sooner: ergo the morals to be observed vis à vis to them are of a stricter order. Railway companies and women are by many looked upon as fair game for deception. Consciences tender in many other respects have a subtle contempt for these two exceptions. Many a so-called honest man travels gaily in a first-class carriage with a second-class ticket, and lies to a woman at each end of his journey without so much as casting a shadow upon his conscience.
Seymour Michael carried this code to the farthest limit of safety. All through the months that followed he went about his business with a clear conscience and a heart slightly relieved by the removal of Anna Hethbridge from his path to prosperity. He served his country and the Company with a keenness of foresight and a soldierly exposure of the lives of others which did not fail, in the course of time, to bring him in a harvest of honours and rewards. Neither did he put his candle under a bushel, but set it in the very highest candlestick available.
But, as has been previously stated, he could not foresee everything. He did not know, for instance, that his cheroot-smoking subaltern—a youth as guileless as he was indiscreet, for the two usually go together—possessed a memory like a dry-plate. He did not foresee that a passing conversation in an Indian bungalow might perchance photograph itself on the somewhat sparsely covered tablets of a man's mind, to be reproduced at the wrong moment with a result lying twenty-six years ahead in the womb of time.
CHAPTER II. SUBURBAN
L'amour fait tout excuser, mais il faut être bien sûr qu'il y a de i amour.
Miss Anna Hethbridge loved Seymour Michael with as great a love as her nature could compass.
When the news of his death reached her, at the profusely laden breakfast-table at Jaggery House, Clapham Common, her first feeling was one of scornful anger towards a Providence which could be so careless. Life had always been prosperous for her, in a bourgeois, solidly wealthy way, entirely suited to her turn of mind. She had always had servants at her beck and call, whom she could abuse illogically and treat with an utter inconsequence inherent in her nature. She had been the spoilt child of a ponderous, thick-skinned father and a very suburban mother, who, out of her unexpected prosperity, could deny her daughter nothing.
Three months after the receipt of the news Anna Hethbridge went down into Hertfordshire, where, in the course of a visit at Stagholme Rectory, she met and became engaged to the Squire of Stagholme, James Edward Agar.