hould she hunt for it, or leave it vague? And then she thought of
Martley. And then she blushed.

CHAPTER XII

MARTLEY THICKET (1)

Urquhart was a man of explosive action and had great reserve of
strength. He was moved by flashes of insight, and was capable of
long-sustained flights of vehement effort; but his will-power was
nourished entirely by those moments of intense prevision, which showed
him a course, and all the stages of it. The mistakes he made, and they
were many and grievous, were mostly due to overshooting his mark,
sometimes to underrating it. In the headlong and not too scrupulous
adventure he was now upon, both defects were leagued against him.

When he first saw Lucy at her dinner-party, he said to himself,
"That's a sweet woman. I shall fall in love with her." To say as much
was proof that he had already done so; but it was the sudden
conviction of it which inspired him, filled him with effervescent
nonsense and made him the best of company, for a dinner-party.
Throughout it, at his wildest and most irresponsible, his fancy and
imagination were at work upon her. He read her to the soul, or
thought so.

Chance, and Lancelot, gave him the chart of the terrain. The switch at
the drawing-room door gave him his plan. The opportunity came, and he
dared to take it. He marked the effect upon her. It was exactly what
he had foreseen. He saw her eyes humid upon Macartney, her hand at
rest on his arm. Jesuitry palliated what threatened to seem monstrous,
even to him. "God bless her, I drive her to her man. What's the harm
in that?"

So he went on--once more, and yet again; and in the meantime by
daylight and by more honest ways he gained her confidence and her
liking. He saw no end to the affair so prosperously begun, and didn't
trouble about one. All he cared about just now were two
courtships--the vicarious in the dark, and the avowed of the daylight.

He intended to go on. He was full of it--in the midst of his other
passions of the hour, such as this of the air. He was certain of his
direction, as certain as he had ever been. But now his mistakes and
miscalculations began. He had mistaken his Lucy, and his Macartney
too.

What he didn't know about Macartney, Lucy did know; what he didn't
know about Lucy was that she had found out James. James as Eros
wouldn't do, chiefly because such conduct on James's part would have
been incredible. Urquhart didn't know it would be incredible, nor did
he