s thoughts. He got up from his
chair, and Drake turned to him. 'I gather from your tone,' he said in an
indifferent voice, 'that Mrs. Willoughby resents my action.'

'My dear fellow, no,' exclaimed Fielding energetically. 'For Heaven's
sake, don't take me for a reflex of Mrs. Willoughby!'

No more plotting for him, he determined. He had planned and calculated
and interfered, all for other people's good, and this was the thanks he
got; to be quietly informed that he hadn't an idea of his own.

The next afternoon Mrs. Willoughby stopped her phaeton beside him in Bond
Street. She looked very well, he thought, with her clear
complexion,--clear as those clear eyes of hers with just the hint of
azure in the whites of them--wind-whipped now to a rosy warmth.

'May I congratulate you yet?' she asked pleasantly.

Fielding was not to be provoked to renew the combat, and he put the
question aside. 'You remember what you told me the other day about
Gorley,' he said.

'Yes,' she answered, becoming serious.

'Well, Miss Le Mesurier knows.'

'Who told her?' and she leaned forward.

'Guess.'

Mrs. Willoughby thought for a moment and then shook her head. 'I can't.
Her father?'

'No; Drake himself.'

She started back in her seat. Then she said, 'Of course, we might have
known that he would,' and the 'we' sealed their reconciliation.

CHAPTER IX

When Fielding had gone, Drake opened the window and stepped out on
the balcony.

'Unless you want to marry her yourself'; the words were stamped upon his
mind in capitals. They formulated to him for the first time the cause of
that unreasoned conviction of his, and formulated it too, as he realised,
with absolute truth. Yes, it was just his desire for Clarice to which he
owed his belief that she had an unquestionable right to know his
responsibility for Gorley's death.

He wanted her, and wanting her, was committed to scrupulous frankness.

Drake looked out across the city. At his feet lay the quiet strip of
garden, lawn and bush; beyond, the lamps burning on the parapets of the
Embankment, and beyond them, the river shining in the starlight, polished
and lucent like a slab of black marble, with broad regular rays upon it
of a still deeper blackness, where the massive columns of Hungerford
Bridge cast shadows on the water. An engine puffed and snorted into the
station, leaving its pennant of white smoke in the air. Through the glass
walls of the signal-box above the