"Kinmair can postpone his visit," Rex said. "Indeed, the storm will cause a general postponement. No one can come through this rain. I think I'll make a run for it!"
But he walked, seeming not to notice the violence and the downpour. The coolness was pleasing on his face, and the damp lowered the feverish temperature of his heated blood, though it proved disastrous to his immaculate dress clothes.
He could see neither Mercia nor Lady Rossland when he entered, but he encountered Trascott elaborating on philanthropies to a penniless dowager. The curate did not note Britton's personal appearance, so deep was he in a cherished plan of building orphan homes and reading rooms for the poor of London, a plan involving the expenditure of something like two millions of money.
"It's admirable," murmured the dowager, who herself had to scrape to keep up appearances. "It's a most beautiful scheme, Mr. Trascott. You have every technicality well within your grasp. What is to prevent the carrying out of those details?"
"The money," Britton heard Trascott answer sadly. "It exists as yet only in my dreams. I have advanced my theories and worked for their realization, but the unthinking rich have not responded. Sometimes I feel as if I shall never live long enough to see my project undertaken either by my own hand or by that of a more competent man."
"Still, it is ideal," the dowager returned, as Rex moved on past them. "And it is something to cherish an ideal to the end of one's life, even if one never enjoys its realization."
Britton took the thought as applied to his own existence, especially in its present crisis, and turned it over and over in his mind while he searched the different rooms for Ainsworth.
Within Rossland's great country mansion the gaiety of the occasion was undiminished. The games, the talk, the dancing, all went on as merrily as if no tempest raged outside. The decorated chambers were illuminated with such a blaze of light that the flashes of the sky's electric current were scarcely in evidence through drawn blinds. Only the spaced, resounding roll of thunder and the crash of giant trees in the woodland groves told that a terrific storm was in progress.
In the centre of the music salon he saw the Rosslands with a crowd of guests, lamenting the disagreeable night that had driven them from the river. Mercia was not with them, and Rex felt that after the incident of the conservatory he must avoid Lady Rossland for the moment.
He crossed the hall and ran into young Guy, who, looking very flushed and disturbed, appeared to have emerged from some more or less inglorious conflict. Guy had on dry shoes, but they had not sufficed to smooth his apparently ruffled feelings.