And, after that outburst, he recovered himself a moment, and stood away from them, breathing too hard, while Mr Harbury looked down, and Mr Barnett smiled a drawn smile of hatred that would not betray fear. Lord Benthorpe, a soldier in his youth, was very genuinely afraid; he was afraid of something indefinable, of catastrophe ... he did not understand these things. There passed through Mr Burden’s mind a spasm of calm which he mistook for self-control; he fumbled at his collar trying to straighten it, he put on a civic dignity, and stood up stiffly, and turned to his son and said: “Come with me, Cosmo.” Cosmo, whom this wild scene had distressed beyond bearing, looked down nervously at the table, shuffled the papers before him, and murmured almost inaudibly: “Don’t make a fool of yourself, father.” Then Mr Burden, stooping forward hurriedly, went out. There was a full three minutes of silence, during which Mr Barnett’s face looked like the face of one of those old and monstrous things, enormous, dug from Assyrian sands, while Mr Harbury coughed twice, and sidled his eyes uncertainly, and Lord Benthorpe twiddled his fingers upon his trembling knees. Then Cosmo, still in confusion, desiring to see whether indeed he would ruin them all and desiring to be rid of the atmosphere of anger, got up and went out after his father. * * * * * In the street another beam of those few which support the structure of human life crashed within him; the old man’s brief draft of energy ran out and was lost utterly. The mechanical action continued; he could pass through the crowds with whom he had mixed for fifty years, but he felt a growing tension of the brain and some such abandonment of grasp and power, as men feel who are drowning, and who lose their consciousness just before they drown. A few steps behind him followed Cosmo, his son. Interests, more momentous than the life of one man, made it imperative to Cosmo that the M’Korio should not be betrayed. There was just time for his father to give notice of disclaimer; there was ample time to visit some one of those newspapers that continued in spite of loss and a deserved unpopularity to attack our great scheme of Empire. The exchange was shut. There was time to ruin everything before the morning. Nor could Cosmo know what his father suffered: he followed in the interests of the M’Korio, and, happily, his father did not know that he followed. There are duties of many kinds; and Cosmo was doing one of these many duties as best he knew.