Thus Chute lived in a little world of his own, lighted up by the remembered face of Clare and the hopes she had bade him cherish.
He marvelled much how Jerry's love affair was progressing, and whether Ida would yet forget his other friend, Jack Beverley.
He thought not, by all he knew of her, yet wished that she should do so, for Jerry's sake.
There was much of humility in the latter, and he held himself of small account with her.
Though proud enough with his own sex, even to hauteur at times, his love for Ida made him her very slave; and now how often came back to Vane's memory, with regret and reproach, the bygone scoffs and silly ironies he had often cast on his friends, who, when he was heart-whole, were suffering from the lost smile of those they had loved, perhaps more truly than wisely.
Recollections of his own laughter, his gibes and his quips, came back to him as if in mockery now.
Trevor Chute and Clare were separated again; but not as before: now he did not feel, as in the old time, that he had lost her, and he looked back to his last interview with joy.
Long though the time seemed since then, it was but recently that her dark eyes had smiled lovingly into his; that all the nameless charms of her presence had been with him, that she had spoken with him, and that he had listened to her.
When would all this come to pass again?
Till then what mattered it how he killed the time, or whither he went?