There must be occasional oversights, and you have been the victim of one.

I mention this to disabuse your mind of the idea of any intentional neglect. Well, Mrs. Lovegrove, and so our good friends Mrs. Porcher and Miss Hart have gone--estimable women both of them in their own line. I ought to be running away, too, and I have just been having a word with your other guest here, Mr.----"

"Iglesias," Dominic put in coldly. He was in a state of pretty high displeasure. To hear his name misp.r.o.nounced might, he felt, precipitate a catastrophe.

"Iglesias?--ah! yes, thank you--I have been explaining to Mr. Iglesias our system of parochial visiting and quoting our well-known joke about the dwellers and sojourners. You remember it? He has, I regret to find, been counted among the latter, while he has qualified as one of the former. The mistake must be remedied. Well, good-by to you, Mrs.

Lovegrove; I shall see your good husband on my way downstairs. Good-day to you, Mr. Iglesias. I shall hope to meet you again."

And with that he, and the encompa.s.sing sound of him, moved towards the door. Mrs. Lovegrove subsided upon the sofa. The supreme glory had departed, yet an afterglow from the effulgence of it remained in her beaming face as she looked up at Mr. Iglesias.

"It was a good fairy that brought you in so early to-day," she said.

"Really, I am pleased you should have had the chance to meet Dr.

Nevington. And I could see he was quite taken with you, by the way he began to talk before I had the chance to introduce you. But that's the vicar all over! He never is one to stand upon ceremony."

"So I can believe," Dominic said.

"You saw it? Ah, part of his thoughtfulness, wanting to put everybody at their ease. And I'm sure if there's one thing more disheartening than another, it is to have two of your friends standing up side by side, as stiff as a couple of pokers, without so much as a word. I know I am too ready to enter into conversation with strangers; but if there is a thing I cannot bear, it's any appearance of coolness."

She pa.s.sed her handkerchief round her forehead and across her lips. She was marshalling her energies for a daring effort.

"Very warm, is it not?" she remarked, perhaps superfluously. Then she came to the point. "I know you are not very much of a churchgoer, Mr.

Iglesias."

"I am afraid not"--he paused a moment. "You see, I was born and brought up in another faith."

"Yes--so George has told me. But I am sure none of us would ever be so illiberal as to throw that up against you. The vicar has been talking so beautifully about Christian charity; and we all know it was a thing you could not help. It was your misfortune, anybody would understand that, not your fault. Too, it's all over long ago and forgotten."

Dominic looked rather hard at her; but it was clear her words were innocent of any intention of offence.

"I suppose it is," he said sadly, Old Age and Loneliness laying their hands upon him, for some reason, very sensibly once again.

"Not that that's anything to be otherwise than thankful for," she added, with a slightly misplaced effort at consolation. "Of course anyone must feel how providential it is to be saved from all those terrible false doctrines and practices--not that I know anything about them. There's so much, don't you think, it is so much better not to know anything about.

Then one feels more at liberty to speak."

Mr. Iglesias smiled.

"I am not sure that the matter had occurred from exactly that point of view before."

"Really now, and a clever person like you!" Mrs. Lovegrove pa.s.sed her handkerchief across her forehead again. "George has a wonderful opinion of your cleverness, you know. And that is why I have always wished you and the vicar could be brought together. I have--yes, I own to it--I have been afraid sometimes you were a little unsettled about religion, and that it might unsettle Georgie, too. But I knew if you once met the vicar that would all be set right. As I often say to George, let anybody just _see_ Dr. Nevington and then they will begin to have an inkling of all they miss in not hearing him in the pulpit."

But here, perhaps fortunately, the master of the house trotted back. He, too, beamed. He was filled with innocent rejoicing. Had he not successfully protected the wife's feelings, and was not Iglesias--who remained to him a wonderful being, stirring whatever element of romance might be resident in his guileless nature--present in person?

"Why, what's the meaning of this, Dominic?" he chuckled. "You've turned over a new leaf, gadding round to at-home days! Where's Threadneedle Street? What's come over you?"

"Threadneedle Street and I have agreed to part company."

"What, for good? Never?" this from both husband and wife.

"Yes, for good," Iglesias said.

Mr. Lovegrove ceased to beam. He became anxious again, and consequently solemn.

"Well, you do surprise me," he said. "Nothing gone wrong, I trust? Not any unpleasantness happened?"

"None," Iglesias answered. In breaking the news to these kindly but rudimentary souls he had determined to treat it very lightly. "I have come to the conclusion that I have worked long enough. It is a mistake to risk dying in harness. You retired, Lovegrove, three years ago. I am going to look about me a little and see what the rest of the world is doing."

"You'll miss the bank, and feel a little strange at first. Georgie did, though he had his home to interest him," Mrs. Lovegrove remarked.

"Undoubtedly George was more fortunate than I am," Iglesias replied, in his most courtly manner.

"Not but that all that could be easily remedied," she added, with a touch of archness. Then Mr. Iglesias thought it time to depart. In the hall his host held him, literally by the b.u.t.tonhole, looking up with squinting blue eyes into his face.

"It's all rather sudden, Dominic," he said. "I do not want to intrude upon your confidence; but if there is anything behind, anything in which I can help?"

Mr. Iglesias shook his head.

"Nothing, my good old friend," he said.

"The wife's right, you know. You'll miss the bank, the regular hours, and the occupation. She's quite right. I did at first."

"I know. But already I have pretty well got through that phase, I think."

"Ah, you have a bigger mind than mine. You can rise to a wider view.

Change affects a commonplace man like myself most. I was dreadfully lost at first--more than the wife knew. Females are very sensitive, and it would have hurt her to know all I felt. If the Almighty is good enough to give a man a faithful woman to look after him, he can't be too scrupulous in sparing her pain--at least, so I think." Suddenly his tone changed.

"But you are not going to leave us, Dominic?--you are not going to move, I do hope?"

He was mindful of his promise to Eliza Hart, but he was also mindful of himself. It had occurred to him for how very much in the interest and pleasure of his life Dominic Iglesias really stood.

"Why, should you regret my going? Should you miss me?" the other asked, struck by his tone.

"Miss you," he said, "and after a friendship covering forty years! I know you are my superior in every way. I know I am not on your level. All the advantage is on my side in our friendship, always has been. But that is just where it is. Why, you know, Dominic--next to the wife of course--all along you have been the best thing I had."

Then it came to Iglesias, looking down at him, that among the many millions of his fellow-mortals, this whimsical childlike being stood nearest to him in sympathy and in love. The thought moved him strangely, at once deepening his sense of isolation and lessening the load of it.

"In that case I will not move. I will stay here, at Trimmer's Green," he said.

When Mr. Lovegrove reentered the sun-faded drawing-room his wife greeted him in these words:

"Well, I have been thinking it all over, Georgie, and we shall only be doing our duty by Mr. Iglesias if we send for your cousin Serena. For my part, I don't trust Mrs. Porcher. Did you see that fly-away blue bow?

Those who seem so soft are often the deepest. And widows have all sorts of little cunning ways with them." She rose from the thrice happy sofa.

"I was gratified to have Dr. Nevington and Mr. Iglesias meet. But we certainly will have to send for Serena," she said.

CHAPTER VII

Mr. Iglesias crossed Trimmer's Green in the dusty sunshine. He had engaged to stay; and, indeed, he asked himself what person, what objects or interests there were to take him else-whither? Nevertheless, the promise seemed, somehow, a limiting of possibility and of hope. It was destiny. London, very evidently, having got him, did not mean to let him go. And London was not attractive this evening, but blouzy and jaded from the heat. He pa.s.sed on into the great thoroughfare and turned eastward, absorbed in thought. Children cried. A pungent scent of over-ripe fruit came from barrows in the roadway and open doors of green-grocers' shops.

Tempers appeared to be on edge. Workmen, pouring out from a big block of flats under construction on the left, jostled him in pa.s.sing, not in insolence, but simply in inattention. Their language was starred with sanguinary adjectives. The noise of the traffic was loud. Iglesias turned up one of the side streets leading on to Campden Hill. It was quieter here and the air was a trifle purer. Halfway up the hill he hesitated.