Loring was not at the club, nor was there any information to be obtained there as to his movements. Julian played a game of billiards and lost it through sheer carelessness, and then determined to go home again. He would walk part of the way, he said to himself, though he had had one walk that day. He wanted to “think things over.” The phrase was serious, and by comparison with the process to which it was attached, grandiloquent. Julian’s mental apparatus was at present as undeveloped as that of a fashionable young man of four-and-twenty may usually be taken to be. The process of “thinking things over,” as conducted within his good-looking head, involved no stern process of reasoning, no exhaustive system of logical deduction from cause to effect, no carefully-balanced opinions of the past or decisions for the future. When he proposed to himself to “think things over,” in short, he simply meant that he should ring a strictly limited number of changes on the fact that, as he expressed it vaguely to himself, it was “awfully hard lines.” It had taken him some time to come to this conclusion. He had flirted with Miss Hilda Newton very happily for the last ten days, with a great deal of wholly unnecessary assistance from that young lady herself, without the very faintest definite intentions towards her. He had enjoyed it, and she had enjoyed it; and the idea which had occurred to him once or twice, that his mother did not enjoy it, had not particularly affected him. Circumstances alone would have been responsible for the proposal which had so nearly been an accomplished fact on the day before. And had the speech to Miss Newton, interrupted by Mrs. Romayne, reached its legitimate conclusion, and received its inevitable response, it was extremely likely that he might by this time have been the victim of a vague consciousness of having made a mistake. But it had been interrupted; and a deeply-injured sense of having been thwarted was consequently not unnatural in its author. That sense of injury which might have passed away in mere sentiment, but which, on the other hand, might, if it had been left untouched by words, have developed into a secret breach between mother and son, had been focussed and rendered definite and tangible, as it were, by his mother’s laughing speeches in the train. It was as he had sat gazing blankly out of the window during the last half-hour of their journey, that he had come to the conclusion before mentioned that it was “awfully hard lines.”