The day’s work was not over yet, though the evening light was making long shadows, and the setting sun was turning the upper windows of the opposite houses into ruddy fire; the street was absolutely silent and deserted when Julian turned quickly into it. He pulled up and surveyed his surroundings with a rapid, comprehensive glance. It was too early yet. He looked at his watch and told himself so with somewhat over-elaborated carelessness, and took out his cigarette-case. He lighted a cigarette; and pacing slowly up and down the pavement on the opposite side of the street to that on which he expected Clemence to emerge, he began to reckon with himself the chances for and against her speedy or tardy appearance. But such practical, matter-of-fact considerations involved a deliberate mental action on his part, and having gone through it, urged by that curious instinct under which intense excitement always desires to assert itself as absolute calm and sanity, he gradually let himself slip away again from the practical and the actual, and gave himself up to the tide of his exhilarated imaginings. There is nothing more exciting, nothing that sooner quickens the mental pulses into a very fever of confusion, than the sudden indulgence of an impulse long resisted. The hour that had passed since the idea, of which his presence in that quiet little street was the outcome, had flashed into Julian’s mind and dominated it, had carried him as completely out of himself, and out of touch with realities, as is a man under the influence of absinthe. As a man so exhilarated will be impervious to a considerable amount of physical pain, so Julian was for the time being absolutely unconscious of anything painful or shameful in his position. The circumstances under which he had parted from Clemence; all the bitter pain and longing under which he had smarted and writhed with such fierce rebellion; the attitude towards himself which his conduct might only too justly have created in his wife; were absolutely obliterated from his mind. He was waiting now--husband, master, altogether the superior; triumphant, successful, self-assured--for his mistaken but doubtless submissive wife; conscious, and rather pleased with the consciousness, that he loved her in spite of her faults.