As Saxonstowe was beginning to wish that his host would appear, Mr. Eustace Darlington was announced, and he found himself diverted from Mrs. Berenson by a new object of interest, in the shape of the man whom Mrs. Damerel had jilted in order to run away with Lucian. Mr. Darlington was a man of apparently forty years of age; a clean-shaven, keen-eyed individual, who communicated an immediate impression of shrewd hard-headedness. He was very quiet and very self-possessed in manner, and it required little knowledge of human nature to predict of him that he would never do anything in a hurry or in a perfunctory manner--a single glance of his eye at the clock as eight struck served to indicate at least one principal trait of his character. ‘It is utterly useless to look at the clock,’ said Haidee, catching Mr. Darlington’s glance. ‘That won’t bring Lucian any sooner--he has probably quite forgotten that he has guests, and gone off to dine at his club or something of that sort. He gets more erratic every day. I wish you’d talk seriously to him, Sprats. He never pays the least attention to me. Last week he asked two men to dine--utter strangers to me--and at eight o’clock came a wire from Oxford saying he had gone down there to see a friend and was staying the night.’ ‘I think that must be delightful in the man to whom you are married,’ said Mrs. Berenson. ‘I should hate to live with a man who always did the right thing at the right moment--so dull, you know.’ ‘There is much to be said on both sides,’ said Darlington dryly. ‘In husbands, as in theology, a happy medium would appear to be found in the _via media_. I presume, Mrs. Berenson, that you would like your husband to wear his waistcoat outside his coat and dine at five o’clock in the morning?’ ‘I would prefer even that to a husband who lived on clock-work principles,’ Mrs. Berenson replied. ‘Eccentricity is the surest proof of strong character.’ ‘I should imagine,’ said Sprats, with a glance at Saxonstowe which seemed to convey to him that the actress was amusing. ‘I should imagine that Lord Saxonstowe and Mr. Darlington are men of clock-work principles.’ Mrs. Berenson put up her pince-nez and favoured the two men with a long, steady stare. She dropped the pince-nez with a deep sigh. ‘They do look like it, don’t they?’ she said despairingly. ‘There’s something in the way they wear their clothes and hold their hands that suggests it. Do you always rise at a certain hour?’ she went on, turning to Saxonstowe. ‘My husband had a habit of getting up at six in summer and seven in winter--it brought on an extraordinary form of nervous disease in me, and the doctors warned him that they would not be responsible for my life if he persisted. I believe he tried to break the habit off, poor fellow, but he died, and so of course there was an end of it.’