Prior moved towards the door, but he paused for a moment on the threshold and looked back. ‘They call you Judas in the Clubs,’ said he, ‘and they are right—no man ever yet trusted you but he was betrayed.’ He walked out, slamming the door behind him, and Meadowes listened to hear his footsteps die away along the passage. ‘A bad man,’ he meditated, ‘but not as bad as myself, though the world takes him to be worse. He’ll end on the gallows—the world will blame him; but the blame will lie with me—I who made him what he is—and I shall sleep with my fathers in the chapel like a Christian.’ Prior meantime walked away through the quiet winter woods—a figure which accorded ill with rural scenes, he so carried with him the savour of towns, the atmosphere of dissipation. A miserable man—to be moral,—pressed for money and at an end of his resources, at an end of pleasure and beginning to realise it; angry, baffled, rejected. He stood to take a last look at Fairmeadowes, lying so peacefully among its wooded fields, with the placid river flowing past it, and then, overpowered by anger, he shook his fist in the air and cursed aloud in that silent place. ‘By ——!’ he cried, ‘you’ll pay me yet for all I’ve done these twenty years! I’ll have your money, or’—his raised right hand fell—‘wanting that, I’ll have your blood.’ CHAPTER XXX As time went on Society began to surmise that Philip Meadowes and his father were not upon the best of terms. The elder man seldom came to town, and when he did, never stayed at his own house, then tenanted by Philip; and this of itself was eloquent of differences. But as against this was the very fact of Philip’s tenancy of the house—an arrangement which seemed to point to amiable relationship. The world wondered, but could do no more. The feud between Meadowes and Simon Prior had, owing to peculiar caution on Prior’s part, never got abroad either; he preferred to be still considered everywhere as Meadowes’ friend. One night (it was the night of the 9th of January, as Philip had afterwards reason enough to remember) fortune drew together in her net at a certain gaming-house, not a thousand miles from Pall Mall, Richard Meadowes, Philip, and Simon Prior. Phil and his father met quite easily; their quarrel had not been so serious as to make this the least difficult for them; but the rest of the men there watched the meeting with great curiosity. If they had only known, they had better have turned their scrutiny upon Meadowes’ meeting with Prior; the cordiality with which these gentlemen met might perhaps, to the observant and cynically-minded, have given a key to their relations. But there probably was no cynic in the company; so Phil was the object of interest.