once more--a bright morning in June--and Caffyn was
sitting over his late breakfast and the 'Observer' in his rooms at
Bayswater. He was in a somewhat gloomy and despondent frame of mind,
for nothing seemed to have gone well with him since his disastrous
reception in Mabel's boudoir. His magnificent prospects in commerce
had suddenly melted away into thin air, for his confiding friend and
intending partner had very inconsiderately developed symptoms of a
premature insanity, and was now 'under restraint.' He himself was in
debt to a considerable extent; his father had firmly refused to
increase what in his opinion was a handsome allowance; and Caffyn had
been obliged to go to a theatrical agent with a view of returning to
the boards, while no opening he thought it worth his while to accept
had as yet presented itself.

Mabel had not relented in the least. He had met her once or twice at
the Featherstones' and, although she had not treated him with any open
coolness, he felt that henceforth there must be an impassable barrier
between them. Now and then, even while she forced herself in public to
listen to him, the invincible horror and repugnance she felt would be
suddenly revealed by a chance look or intonation--and he saw it and
writhed in secret. And yet he went everywhere that there was a
possibility of meeting her, with a restless impulse of self-torture,
while his hate grew more intense day by day.

And all this he owed to Mark Ashburn--a fact which Harold Caffyn was
not the man to forget. He had been careful to cultivate him, had found
out his address and paid him one or two visits, in which he had
managed to increase the intimacy between them.

Mark was now entirely at his ease with him. His air of superiority had
been finally dropped on the evening of Mr. Fladgate's dinner, and he
seemed flattered by the assiduity with which Caffyn courted his
society. Still, if he had a secret, it was his own still. Caffyn
watched in vain for the look of sudden terror which he had once
succeeded in surprising. At times he began to fear that it was some
involuntary nervous contraction from which his own hopes had led him
to infer the worst, for he was aware that countenances are not always
to be depended upon; that a nervous temperament will sometimes betray
all the signs of guilt from the mere consciousness that guilt is
suspected. If that was the case here, he felt himself powerless. It is
only in melodramas that a well-cond