Three-quarters of an hour later he was coming rapidly down the staircase which led from Loring’s chambers. His face was flushed and quivering, and every pulse was beating madly, like the pulses of a man who has just given unrestrained expression to furious passion. He turned on to the Embankment, and began to walk away in a headlong fashion, evidently neither knowing nor caring where he was going. And as he walked the tumultuous life and glow of his face died slowly out, and settled into a haggard, sullen mask of dull despair. He had spoken his mind to Loring, and now there was nothing more for him to do. CHAPTER VIII “We are all the slaves of man, my dear Lady Bracondale. You are kept in town because Parliament insists on keeping your husband; and I am kept in town because--oh, because the most capricious young man in London happens to be my son!” An afternoon call in the first week of August is distinctly an anomaly, and seems to partake somewhat of the nature of a visit of condolence. Parliament was sitting late this year, and those hapless wives who considered it their duty to wait in town until their legislating husbands were released, visited one another, and were visited by the one or two acquaintances detained in London by other causes, in a manner which betrayed a combination of martyrdom and shamefacedness. Lady Bracondale, who was nothing if not a personification of duty done, or in the act of doing, was being condoled with, or called upon, on this particular August afternoon, by two distinct sets of sympathising acquaintances; two sets, which, in spite of placid words and pretty speeches, seemed to be entirely incapable of amalgamation; Mrs. Romayne, and Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter, who had arrived a few minutes later. And it was to Mrs. Pomeroy that Lady Bracondale--who had a peculiar gift for saying in a stately and condescending manner the things which quicker perceptions would have recognised as not being precisely the best things to be said under the circumstances--turned, as Mrs. Romayne stopped speaking. “I suppose Mrs. Romayne looks upon you as the exception that proves her rule,” she said. “For it is not a case of manly compulsion with you, I believe? I hope your sister goes on well?” Mrs. Pomeroy, having neither husband nor son, was detained in town by the presence in her house of the sister whom she had visited earlier in the year, and who had spent the last month under the care of a London doctor. But her tone was as placid as ever as she replied: “Thank you, I believe they consider her nearly recovered, for the time being. She hopes to go home this week. And then Maud and I will go and pay some country visits. We don’t think of going abroad this year. I shouldn’t feel easy to be out of England while my sister remains in this state.”