ver immediately.

* * * * *

IV

The excursion to the club had taken longer than Mr. Prohack had
anticipated, and when he got back home it was nearly lunch-time. No sign
of an Eagle car or any other car in front of the house! Mr. Prohack let
himself in. The sounds of a table being set came from the dining-room.
He opened the door there. Machin met him at the door. Each withdrew from
the other, avoiding a collision.

"Your mistress returned?"

"Yes, sir." Machin seemed to hesitate, her mind disturbed.

"Where is she?"

"I was just coming to tell you, sir. She told me to say that she was
lying down."

"Oh!"

Disdaining further to interrogate the servant, he hurried upstairs. He
had to excuse himself to Eve, and he had also to justify to her the
placing of eighty thousand pounds in a scheme which she could not
possibly understand and for which there was nothing whatever to show.
She would approve, of course; she would say that she had complete
confidence in his sagacity, but all the inflections of her voice, all
her gestures and glances, would indicate to him that in her opinion he
was a singularly ingenuous creature, the natural prey of sharpers, and
that the chances of their not being ruined by his incurable simplicity
were exceedingly small. His immense reputation in the Treasury, his
sinister fame as the Terror of the departments, would not weigh an atom
in her general judgment of the concrete case affecting the fortunes of
the Prohack family. Then she would be brave; she would be bravely
resigned to the worst. She would kiss his innocence. She would quite
unconvincingly assure him, in her own vocabulary, that he was a devil of
a fellow and the smartest man in the world.

Further, she would draw in the horns of her secret schemes of
expenditure. She would say that she had intended to do so-and-so and to
buy so-and-so, but that perhaps it would be better, in view of the
uncertainties of destiny, neither to do nor to buy so-and-so. In short,
she would succeed in conveying to him the idea that to live with him was
like being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy
Atlantic. She loved to live with him, the compensations were exquisite,
and moreover what would be his fate if he were alone? Still, it was like
being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy
Atlantic. And she would cling closer to him and point to the red sun
setting among bla