When the party dispersed and he was walking alone towards Aldgate through the night, he could do nothing but repeat to himself fragments of what she had said to him—lost all the time in a miserable yearning memory of her eyes and voice.
His mind was made up. And as he lay sleepless and solitary through the night, he scarcely thought any more of the strait to which his married life had come. Forty-eight hours hence he should have time for that. For the present he had only to "think out" how it might be possible for him to turn doubt and turmoil into victory, and lay the crown of it at Marcella Maxwell's feet.
Meanwhile Marcella, on her return to St. James's Square, put her hands on Maxwell's shoulders, and said to him, in a voice unlike herself: "Sir George Tressady was at the party to-night. I think he may be going to throw Lord Fontenoy over. Don't be surprised if he speaks in that sense to-morrow."
Maxwell looked extraordinarily perturbed.
"I hope he will do nothing of the kind," he said, with decision. "It will do him enormous harm. All the conviction he has ever shown has been the other way. It will be thought to be a mere piece of caprice and indiscipline."
Marcella said nothing. She walked away from him, her hands clasped behind her, her soft skirt trailing—a pale muse of meditation—meditation in which for once she did not invite him to share.
"Tressady, by all that's wonderful!" said a member of Fontenoy's party to his neighbour. "What's he got to say?"
The man addressed bent forward, with his hands on his knees, to look eagerly at the speaker.
"I knew there was something up," he said. "Every time I have come across Tressady to-day he has been deep with one or other of those fellows"—he jerked his head towards the Liberal benches. "I saw him buttonholing Green in the Library, then with Speedwell on the Terrace. And just look at their benches! They're as thick as bees! Yes, by George! there is something up."
His young sportsman's face flushed with excitement, and he tried hard through the intervening heads to get a glimpse of Fontenoy. But nothing was to be seen of the leader but a hat jammed down over the eyes, a square chin, and a pair of folded arms.