"Shall you miss a sitting of the commission?" asked his host. Both he and Raeburn were members of an important Labour Commission appointed the year before by the new Conservative government.
"Hardly, I think," said Raeburn, "I am particularly anxious not to miss
D——'s evidence."
And they fell talking a little about the Commission and the witnesses recently examined before it. Wharton, who was wedged in by a group of ladies, and could not for the moment move, heard most of what they were saying, much against his will. Moreover Raeburn's tone of quiet and masterly familiarity with what he and his companion were discussing annoyed him. There was nothing in the world that he himself would more eagerly have accepted than a seat on that Commission.
"Ah! there is Lady Cradock!" said Raeburn, perceiving his hostess across a sea of intervening faces, and responding to her little wave of the hand. "I must go and get a few words with her, and then take my aunt away."
As he made his way towards her, he suddenly brushed against Wharton, who could not escape. Raeburn looked up, recognised the man he had touched, flushed slightly and passed on. A bystander would have supposed them strangers to each other.
CHAPTER II.
Two or three minutes later, Wharton was walking down a side street towards Piccadilly. After all the flattering incidents of the evening, the chance meeting with which it concluded had jarred unpleasantly. Confound the fellow! Was he the first man in the world who had been thrown over by a girl because he had been discovered to be a tiresome pedant? For even supposing Miss Boyce had described that little scene in the library at Mellor to her fiancé at the moment of giving him his dismissal—and the year before, by the help of all the news that reached him about the broken engagement, by the help still more of the look, or rather the entire absence of look wherewith Raeburn had walked past his greeting and his outstretched hand in a corridor of the House, on the first occasion of their meeting after the news had become public property, Wharton was inclined to think she had—what then? No doubt the stern moralist might have something to say on the subject of taking advantage of a guest's position to tamper with another man's betrothed. If so, the stern moralist would only show his usual incapacity to grasp the actual facts of flesh and blood. What chance would he or any one else have had with Marcella Boyce, if she had happened to be in love with the man she had promised to marry? That little trifle had been left out in the arrangement. It might have worked through perfectly well without; as it happened it had broken down. Realities had broken it down. Small blame to them!
"I stood for truth!" he said to himself with a kind of rage—"that moment when I held her in the library, she lived.—Raeburn offered her a platform, a position; I made her think, and feel. I helped her to know herself. Our relation was not passion; it stood on the threshold—but it was real—a true relation so far as it went. That it went no farther was due again to circumstances—realities—of another kind. That he should scorn and resent my performance at Mellor is natural enough. If we were in France he would call me out and I should give him satisfaction with all the pleasure in life. But what am I about? Are his ways mine? I should have nothing left but to shoot myself to-morrow if they were!"
He walked on swiftly, angrily rating himself for those symptoms of a merely false and conventional conscience which were apt to be roused in him by contact with Aldous Raeburn.
"Has he not interfered with my freedom—stamped his pedantic foot on me—ever since we were boys together! I have owed him one for many years—now I have paid it. Let him take the chances of war!"