"That's all right. And I tell you what, Dick," he paused, and smiled upon his friend. "Hope I'm not taking an infernal liberty! But if you can afford it—and if you can hit on the right girl—you might do worse than bring a wife back with you. You're the sort that's bound to marry some time, and you may take my word for it, thirty's a better age to start than thirty-five."
Richardson laughed, and coloured again, hotly.
"It takes two to make that sort of start," he said, "And if a fellow hits on the wrong one, it must be the very devil."
"Yes, by Jove, it must!" Lenox answered feelingly; adding in his own mind that even with the right one, it could be the very devil, now and again. "Think of poor Norton. But you'll have better luck, I hope. About stopping on for the present, of course you must please yourself. You'd be very welcome; and if you're afraid of taking up too much of my wife's time, you can easily give me more of your company than you have done so far. See how you feel about it to-morrow."
"Thanks, I will."
He rose now unhindered; and stood a moment hesitating, fired with a very human wish to express his gratitude. But Lenox had accepted and dismissed the whole incident in a fashion at once so impersonal, so chivalrous, that his aching sense of disloyalty and unworthiness seemed to have been tacitly wiped out, leaving one only course open to him—to act as though that culminating hour of madness had never been.
"See you again before I start for mess," he said, as Lenox looked up. And the dreaded interview—that should have broken up everything, yet had altered nothing, save his own estimate of life—was over.
Lenox, left alone again, bowed his head upon his hands, and sat a long time motionless, while the white flame of anger leaped and burned in his brain; anger such as he had never yet felt towards his wife. The spirit of his formidable uncle still so far survived in him that instinctively he blamed the woman; blamed himself also because pride and a strong distaste for self-assertion had inclined him to an attitude of masterly inactivity. In this fine fashion, between them, they had rewarded Dick for an unrecognised act of gallantry that might well have cost him his life; and nothing now remained but to make such inadequate atonement as the case admitted. Strange as it may seem, he had never come so near to loving his friend as at that moment.
As for Quita—was there even the remotest chance that she also . . . ? His brain refused to complete such a question. The thing was unthinkable. But in any case his own duty stood out crystal clear. When he had mastered his anger sufficiently to risk speech, he and she must come to terms upon this thorny subject once for all. And he must take his stand upon the bare rock of principle. Let her brand him bourgeois, Covenanter, what she would. Dick's secret must be kept—at any cost!