If you've got any influence with her, use it, and use it quickly. She doesn't know--you none of you know--the danger she's in at present!"

He jumped up to pace the room in uncontrollable nervous excitement.

"What's going to happen, Seraph?" I asked, in a voice that was intended to be sympathetic, sceptical, and pacifying at one and the same moment.

"I don't know--but she's in danger--I know that--I know that--I'm certain of that--I know that."

His overstrung nerves betrayed themselves in a dozen different ways.

It occurred to me that the less time he spent alone in his own society the better.

"I'll see if I can do anything," I said in off-hand fashion.

"Meantime, I dropped in to know if your invitation held good for a bed under your hospitable roof-tree."

"Delighted to have you," he answered; and then less conventionally, "it's very kindly intended."

"Kindness all on _your_ side," I murmured, pretending not to see that he had plumbed the reason for my coming.

The old, absent thought-reading look returned for an instant to his eyes.

"All my razors are on my dressing-table," he said. "Don't hide them. I shan't commit suicide, but I shall want to shave. I never keep firearms."

I had intended to supervise my removal from Pont Street in person; on reflection I thought it would be wiser to send instructions over the telephone, and give the Seraph the benefit of my company for what it was worth.

CHAPTER IX

THE THIRD ROUND

"When we two parted In silence and tears, Half broken-hearted To sever for years, Pale grew thy cheek and cold, Colder thy kiss; Truly that hour foretold Sorrow to this."

LORD BYRON: _When We Two Parted_.

Though the flat in Adelphi Terrace became my home from this time until the end of my residence in England, I saw little of the Seraph for the week following my change of quarters. I think he liked my company at meals, and whenever we were together I certainly worked hard to distract his mind from the unhappy quarrel with Sylvia. But I will not pretend that I sat by him day and night devising consolatory speeches; I am no good at that kind of thing, he would have seen through me, and we should speedily have got on one another's nerves. For the first day or two, then, I purposely measured out my companionship in small doses; later on, when he had got used to my presence, I became more assiduous. Those were the days when I could see reflected in his eyes the fast approaching nightmare of his dreams.

My one positive achievement lay in persuading him to resume the curious journal he had started at Brandon Court and continued in Oxford. I called--and still call--it the third volume of Rupert Chevasse's life, or, more accurately, "The Child of Misery"; for though it will never be published, its literary parentage is the same, and its elder brothers are Volumes One and Two. I count it one of the great tragedies of the book-world that--at least in his life-time--the third volume will never be given to the public; in my opinion--for what that is worth--it is the finest work Aintree has ever accomplished. At the same time I fully endorse his resolution to withhold it; it has been a matter of lasting surprise that even I was allowed to read the manuscript.

He worked a great many hours each day as soon as I had helped the flywheel over dead-point. Half-way through the morning I would wander into the library and find a neat manuscript chapter awaiting me; when I had finished reading, he would throw me over sheet after sheet as each was completed. It was an interesting experience to sit, as it were, by an observation hive and watch his vivid, hyper-sensitive mind at work. I had been present at half the scenes and meetings he was describing. I had heard large fragments of the dialogue and allowed my imagination to browse on the significance of each successive "soul-brush." Yet--I seemed to have heard and seen less than nothing!

His insight enabled him to depict a psychological development where I had seen but a material friendship. It was one-sided, of course, and gave me only the impression that a vital, commanding spirit like Sylvia's would leave on his delicate, receptive imagination. When at a later date Sylvia took me into her confidence and showed me reverse and obverse side by side, I felt like one who has assumed a fourth dimension and looked down from a higher plane into the very hearts of two fellow-creatures. It was a curious experience to see those souls stripped bare--I am not sure that I wish to repeat it--there comes a point where a painful "study of mankind is man."

While the Seraph worked, I had plentiful excuse for playing truant.

Decency ordained that after my twenty years' respite I should spend a certain amount of time with my brother and his wife, and since Sylvia's edict of banishment, I was the sole channel of communication between Cadogan Square and Adelphi Terrace. It was noticeable--though I say it in no carping spirit--that Philip sought my company a shade less assiduously when I ceased to watch over the welfare of Gladys.

Finally, I devoted a portion of each day to Chester Square. Elsie adhered to her decision that the Seraph must be no more seen in company with her in public, and even a private call at the house was impossible so long as his face carried the marks of Sylvia's resentment.

The burden of the publicity-campaign fell on my shoulders, though it came to be relieved--to his honour be it said!--by Gartside. I gave him my views of Elsie's behaviour, brought the two of them together at dinner, and left his big, kind heart to do the rest. He responded as I knew he would, and his adhesion to our party was matter of grave offence to Elsie's detractors, for his name carried more weight with the little-minded than the rest of us put together. Culling enrolled himself for a while, but dropped away as he dropped out of most sustained efforts. Laziness brought about his defection more than want of faith or the pressure of orthodox friends; indeed I am not sure that his strongest motive in joining us was not a passing desire to confound Nigel Rawnsley. In this as in other things, we never treated him seriously; but with Gartside it was different. At a time when Carnforth's resignation of the Bombay Governorship was in the hands of the India Office--and it was an open secret that Gartside's name stood high on the list of possible successors--it required some courage to incur the kind of notoriety that without doubt we both of us did incur. He ought to have been lunching with Anglo-Indians and patting the cheeks of Cabinet Ministers' children, instead of trying to infect Society with his belief in a divorced woman's innocence.

In the course of the campaign I began to see a little, but only a little, more of Joyce than I had been privileged to do during the time when I was supposed to be watching over the destiny of Gladys. I am not sure that I altogether enjoyed my new liberty of access to her house; it worried me to see how overworked and tired she was beginning to look, though I had the doubtful satisfaction of knowing that nothing I could say or do would check her. She risked her health as recklessly as she had been risking her liberty since the inauguration of the New Militancy. I had to treat her politics like a cold in the head and allow them to run their nine days' course. Though I saw she was still cumbered with my scarab ring, we never referred to our meeting in Oxford. I am vain enough to think that she did not regard me even at this time with complete disfavour, but I will atone for my vanity by saying I dared do next to nothing to forward my suit. My foothold was altogether too precarious; an attempt to climb higher would only have involved me in a headlong fall.

And yet, before I had been a week at Adelphi Terrace, I made the attempt. Elsie telephoned one evening that she was going out, but would have to leave Joyce who was too tired to face a restaurant and theatre. She would be dining alone; if I had nothing better to do, would I look in for a few minutes and see if I could cheer her up? I had promised to dine with Nigel, but it was a small party and I managed to slip away before ten. Joyce was half asleep when I was shown into the drawing-room; she did not hear me announced, and I was standing within two feet of her before she noticed my presence.

"I've run you to earth at last," I said.

Then I observed a thing that made me absurdly pleased. Joyce was looking very white and tired, with dark rings round the eyes, and under either cheekbone a little hollow that ought not to have been there. When she opened her eyes and saw me, I could swear to a tiny flush of pleasure; the blue eyes brightened, and she smiled as children smile in their sleep.

"Very nearly inside it," she answered, with a woebegone shake of the head. "Oh, Toby, but I'm so tired! Don't make me get up."

I had no thoughts of doing so. Indeed, my mind was solely concerned with the reflection that she had called me Toby; it was the first time.

"What have you been doing to get yourself into this state?" I asked severely.

"Working."

"There you are!" I said. "Something always happens when people take to work. I shall now read you a short lecture on female stamina."

"You're sure you wouldn't prefer to smoke?"

"I can do both."

"Oh, that's not fair."

Joyce Davenant and Sylvia Roden have only two characteristics in common; one is that I am very fond of both, the other, that I can do nothing with either. I capitulated, and selected a cigarette.

"A live dog's worth a good many dead lions," I reminded her as a final shot.

"Are _you_ trying to convince me of the error of my ways?"

"I am not your Suffragan Bishop," I answered in the tone Robert Spencer adopted in telling a surprised House of Commons that he was not an agricultural labourer.

"I'm so glad. I couldn't bear an argument to-night."

The effort she had made on my arrival had spent itself, and I was not at all certain whether I ought to stay.

"Look here," I said, "if you're too tired to see me, I'll go."

"Please, don't!" she laid a restraining hand on my sleeve. "I'm all right if you don't argue or use long words; but I've had such a headache the last few days that I haven't been able to sleep, and now I don't seem able to fix my attention properly, or remember things."

I had met these symptoms before; the first time in India with men who were being kept too long at work in the hot weather.

"In other words, you want a long rest."

She nodded without speaking.

"Why don't you take it?"

"I simply can't. I've put my hand to the plough, and you know what we are. Obstinate, hard-mouthed brutes, the whole family of us. I've got other people to consider, I mustn't fail them."

"And the benighted, insignificant people who don't happen to be your followers? Some of them may cherish a flickering interest in your existence."