dinner to his neighbour, Mrs. Engel, to whom
the persons were known. Later in his room, face to face with the
facts which it signified, he had an intolerable hour. He had
extinguished his candle, and sat, partially undressed, in a mood of
singular blankness by the fire of gnarled olive logs, which had
smouldered down into one dull, red mass; and Eve's face was imaged
there to his sick fancy as he had seen it last in Dick's studio in
the vague light of an October evening, and yet with a certain new
shadow, half sad and half reproachful, in the beautiful eyes. After
all, had he done his best for the child? Now that this thing was
irrevocable and complete, a host of old misgivings and doubts, which
he had believed long ago banished, broke in upon him. He had only
asked that she should be happy--at least, he said, it had never
been a question of himself. He certainly knew nothing to Lightmark's
discredit, nothing which could have justified him in interfering,
even if interference could have prevailed. The two had fallen in
love with one another, and, the man not being visibly bad, the
marriage had come about; was there more to say? And yet Rainham's
ill-defined uneasiness still questioned and explored. A hundred
little episodes in his friendship with the brilliant young painter,
dismissed as of no import at the time, returned to him--instances,
as it seemed now to his morbid imagination, in which that character,
so frank and so enigmatic, rang scarcely true. And suddenly the
tragical story of Kitty Crichton intruded itself before him, with
all its shameful possibilities. Could Lightmark have lied to him?
Had not his sudden acquiescence in the painter's rendering of the
thing implied a lack of courage--been one of those undue indolences,
to which he was so prone, rather than any real testimony of his
esteem? Would not a more rigorous inquiry, a little patient
investigation into so curious a coincidence, have been the more
seemly part, as much for his friend's sake as for Eve's, so that
this haunting, intolerable doubt might have been for ever put
away--as surely it would have been? The contrary issue was too
horrible for supposition. And he ended by mocking at himself with a
half-sigh for carrying fastidiousness so far, recognising the
mundane fitness of the match, and that heroic lovers, such as his
tenderness for the damsel would have had, are, after all, rare,
perhaps hardly existing out of visions in a somewhat gross wo