With a deep breath he raised himself on his seat; in the old Greek phrase, "the gods breathed courage into his soul"; and as he stretched out an indifferent hand toward Chloe's letters on the trunk, Roger Barnes had perhaps reached the highest point of his moral history; he had become conscious of himself as a moral being choosing good or evil; and he had chosen good. It was not so much that his conscience accused him greatly with regard to Chloe. For that his normal standards were not fine enough. It was rather a kind of "serious call," something akin to conversion, or that might have been conversion, which befell him in this dusty room, amid the night-silence.
As he took up Chloe's letters he did not notice that the door had quietly opened behind him, and that a figure stood on the threshold.
A voice struck into the stillness.
"Roger!"
He turned with a movement that scattered all his own letters on the floor. Daphne stood before him—but with the eyes of a mad woman. Her hand shook on the handle of the door.
"What are you doing here?" She flung out the question like a blow.
"Hallo, Daphne!—is that you?" He tried to laugh. "I'm only looking up some old papers; no joke, in all this rubbish." He pointed to it.
"What old papers?"
"Well, you needn't catechize me!" he said, nettled by her tone, "or not in that way, at any rate. I couldn't sleep, and I came up here to look for something I wanted. Why did you shut your door on me?"
He looked at her intently, his lips twitching a little. Daphne came nearer.