With the unexpected return of George Dallas to London from Amsterdam, an occurrence against which so much precaution had been taken, and which had appeared to be so very improbable, a sense of discouragement and alarm had stolen over Stewart Routh. In the coarse bold sense of the term, he was a self-reliant man. He had no faith in anything higher or holier than luck and pluck; but, in those mundane gods, his faith was steadfast, and had been hitherto justified. On the whole, for an outcast (as he had been for some time, that time, too, so important in a man's life) he had not done badly; he had schemed successfully, and cunning and crime had availed him. He was a callous man by nature, of a base disposition; and, under any circumstances, would have been cool-headed and dogged. In the circumstances in which he found himself, his dogged cool-headedness was peculiarly useful and valuable. He had relied upon them without any doubt or misgiving until the day on which he was convinced by George Dallas's appearance on the stage, which he believed him to have abandoned for an indefinite time, that he had made a miscalculation. Then a slow cold fear began to creep over him. Had his luck--what marvellous luck it had been!--turned? Believers in such a creed as his are mostly superstitious fanatics. He had felt some such dread; then, from the moment when Harriet--Harriet, who should have seen that he had blundered: confound the woman, was _she_ losing her head?--had told him, in her smooth encouraging way, that this new difficulty should be surmounted as the others had been. Not the smallest touch of repentance, not the slightest shadow of remorse, fell upon him with the stirring of this fact--only a hard, contemptuous anger against himself and Harriet, and a bitter scornful hatred for the young man who had been his tool for so long, and might now, in a moment, be turned into the agent of his punishment. When George Dallas left Harriet after the discussion which had terminated in his promise not to move in the matter of the identification of Deane, Stewart Routh, though he bore himself with calmness in his talk with his wife, had invariably writhed and raged under the galling sense of the first check he had received. If he could have done it safely, if the deed would not have been more fatal than the conjuncture he feared, he would have murdered Dallas readily; and he told himself so. He had none of the poetry, none of the drama of crime about him. He was not a man to kill one human being because it suited his purpose to do so, and then to hesitate about killing another, if a still more powerful preventive presented itself; he was incapable of the mixture of base and cruel motives with the kind of sentimental heroics, with which the popular imagination endows criminals of the educated classes. He had all the cynicism of such individuals, cynicism which is their strongest, characteristic; but he had nothing even mock heroic in his composition.