It was vacation still, and chambers were deserted; Henry and the boy departed at four o'clock in vacation. He let himself in with his key, lit his fire, induced a blaze in it, and sat down for a smoke before it. Marie Sarradet came back into his mind now--Marie Barslow; the new name set him smiling, recalling, wondering. How if the new name had not been Barslow but another? Would that have meant being the prop of the family and the business, being engulfed in Sarradet's Limited? That was what it meant for Sidney Barslow--among other things, of course. But who could tell what things might mean? Suppose the great farce had succeeded, had really been a gold mine--of the sort with gold in it--really a second _Help Me out Quickly!_ Where would he be now--he and his thousands of pounds--if that had happened? Would he have been producing more farces, and giving more engagements to infectious Ayesha Layard and indefatigable Willie Spring? _Dis aliter visum_--Fate decreed otherwise. Detached from the fortunes of Sarradet's Limited, rudely--indeed very rudely--repulsed from the threshold of theatrical venture, he had come back to his Legitimate Mistress. He knew her ways--her rebuffs, her neglect, her intolerable procrastination; but he had enjoyed just a taste of her favour and attractions too--of the interest and excitement, of the many-sided view of life, that she could give. Because of these, and also because of her high dignity and great traditions--things in which Sarradet's Limited and theatrical ventures seemed to him not so rich--he made up his mind to follow the beckoning of fate's finger and to stick to her, even though she half-starved him, and tried him to the extreme limit of his patience--after her ancient wont. But his renewed allegiance was to be on terms; so at least he tried to pledge the future. He did not want his whole life and thought swallowed up. Here his own temperament had much to say, but his talks with Sir Christopher a good deal also. He would not be a sleuth-hound on the track of success (a Norton Ward, as he defined it to himself privily), nose to the ground, awake to that scent only, with no eyes for the world about him--or again, as it might be put, he would not have his life just a ladder, a climb up the steep side of a cliff, in hope of an eminence dizzy and uncertain enough even if he got there, and with a handsome probability of tumbling into the tomb half-way up. Could terms be made with the exacting Mistress about this? Really he did not know. So often she either refused all favours or stifled a man under the sheer weight of them. That was her way. Still, Sir Christopher had dodged it.