id, "I quite understand. With your permission
I will say good-bye to you now, and to-morrow morning I will catch the
earliest train from Muskeere."

He looked at his host steadily. Then, through the temper that still
mastered him, a twinge of regret, a sense of parting and loss obtruded
themselves. With all his intolerable faults, Asshlin still stood within
the halo and glamour of the past.

"Denis!" he exclaimed suddenly.

But the appeal was made too late. Uncontrollable fury--the one power
which could efface his sense of hospitality--possessed Asshlin. His
pulses pounded; his senses were blurred. With a seething consciousness
of insult and injury, he turned again upon his guest.

"You can go to hell for all I care!" he cried savagely.

For a second Milbanke continued to look at him; then without a word he
turned, crossed the room, and passed into the hall.

_PART II_

CHAPTER I

It was on a windy March morning three years after his summarily ended
visit to Ireland, that James Milbanke stood in the bedroom of his
London flat. A perturbed frown puckered his forehead and he held an
open letter in his hand.

Outside, the dark sky and cold searching breeze proclaimed the raw
English spring; inside, the partly dismantled walls of the room, the
emptied drawers and wardrobe, the trunks, bags, and rugs standing ready
strapped, all suggested another and more inviting climate. Milbanke was
bound for the south.

Three months earlier he had come to the momentous conclusion that a
solitary life in London--spent no matter how comfortably--becomes a
colourless and somewhat empty thing after a thirty-three years'
experience. He had his club and his friends, but he was not a clubman
born, and friends must be very intimate to be all-sufficing. The
restlessness that sometimes unexpectedly attacks the middle-aged
bachelor had fallen upon him. The suggestion that he craved new
surroundings and new fields of interest had been slow in coming, and
his acceptance of it had been slow. But steadily and inevitably it had
grown into his consciousness, maturing almost against his will, until
at last the day had dawned on which he had admitted to himself that a
change was indispensable. The subsequent events had followed in natural
order. His hobby had urged him to leave his own country for one richer
in association; the damp cold of the English winter, coupled with the
chilled blood of advancing age, had inclined him to t