ad
clearly been reckoned on in the great leather-covered lounge that,
raised by a step or two above the floor, applied its back to two
quarters of the wall and enjoyed most immediately a view of the
billiard-table. Mr. Longdon continued for a minute to roam with the air
of dissimulated absence that, during the previous hour and among the
other men, his companion's eye had not lost; he pushed a ball or two
about, examined the form of an ash-stand, swung his glasses almost
with violence and declined either to smoke or to sit down. Vanderbank,
perched aloft on the bench and awaiting developments, had a little the
look of some prepossessing criminal who, in court, should have changed
places with the judge. He was unlike many a man of marked good looks
in that the effect of evening dress was not, with a perversity often
observed in such cases, to over-emphasise his fineness. His type was
rather chastened than heightened, and he sat there moreover with a
primary discretion quite in the note of the deference that from the
first, with his friend of the elder fashion, he had taken as imposed.
He had a strong sense for shades of respect and was now careful to
loll scarcely more than with an official superior. "If you ask me," Mr.
Longdon presently continued, "why at this hour of the night--after a day
at best too heterogeneous--I don't keep over till to-morrow whatever I
may have to say, I can only tell you that I appeal to you now because
I've something on my mind that I shall sleep the better for being rid
of."

There was space to circulate in front of the haut-pas, where he had
still paced and still swung his glasses; but with these words he had
paused, leaning against the billiard-table, to meet the interested
urbanity of the answer they produced. "Are you very sure that having
got rid of it you WILL sleep? Is it a pure confidence," Vanderbank said,
"that you do me the honour to make me? Is it something terrific that
requires a reply, so that I shall have to take account on my side of the
rest I may deprive you of?"

"Don't take account of anything--I'm myself a man who always takes too
much. It isn't a matter about which I press you for an immediate answer.
You can give me no answer probably without a good deal of thought. I'VE
thought a good deal--otherwise I wouldn't speak. I only want to put
something before you and leave it there."

"I never see you," said Vanderbank, "that you don't put something before
me."

"Tha