One moment of indecision, as he caught sight of the dress suit upon the bed. Strange that it should fit. He remembered the beautiful rooms downstairs. He would be decidedly out of the picture in his tweeds. He remembered the full-length mirror at the Mayor’s party. “He should have come as the Black Prince.” How he had enjoyed the remark! His first lesson in vanity. He smiled to think how often he had repeated it to himself, and postured in his shabby little suits. Do people realise how inordinately vain a small boy can be?... Should he? No! That was a fancy-dress masquerade; and so would this be. Whatever anybody said, whatever anybody thought, he must meet Lady Tintagel clad at least in the raiment of his own self-respect and independence. It was not as though he had arrived soaked through and had had to borrow dry things. He brushed his old tweeds vigorously with “Colin’s” silver-backed clothes-brush. A gong boomed sonorously through the house. As he walked down the stairs he was still thinking, with dream-like persistence, of the dress difficulty. “I shall say: ‘Excuse this rig. One travels light on a walking tour.’” In the hall the butler waited. “This way, sir.” SCENE IV THE PRISON BARS DISSOLVE Lady Tintagel was alone. She stood at the far end of the drawing-room. When he entered she was leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down into the fire. She turned, still gripping the marble edge with her left hand. She wore a gown of trailing black velvet and stood on a white Angora rug. Miles of rose carpet lay between him and the fireplace. He seemed to be walking uphill, as he came toward her. When he reached the rug at last, he and she seemed to be standing together on the summit of a delectable mountain. His mind still ran on his unsuitable attire, but he forgot the sentence he had prepared. “I couldn’t,” was his lame apology. She looked at him, and smiled. “_You_—wouldn’t,” she said. There was such complete understanding in the grave regard of her kind eyes, in the low tones of her voice, so sweet and full of music. It was all strangely intimate. As he stood beside her, lines he had heard years before flashed into his mind. “Two men looked out through prison bars; One saw mud; the other, stars.” Hitherto he had seen mud—always mud. In her presence he realised the possibility of seeing stars—undreamed of stars. And his prison bars themselves seemed vanishing. Something captive in him broke its chains and leapt out into liberty. And still she spoke no word; but her eyes dwelt on him with that all-enveloping, comprehending look of tenderness. An unspoken sentence seemed to hang suspended. The silence was tense with it, as when a great orchestra, ready to sound the opening strain of a mighty symphony, waits, with eye, hand, and ear alert, for the first beat of the lifted baton. But, on the instant, came an anti-climax.