Robert escaped into the sweet night air with a sense of unutterable relief. The Park gates were still open, and he turned into the broad walk, and, lighting a cigarette, walked on between the trees which hung motionless above his head. His brain was whirling, but by an effort of will he retraced the events of the evening, beginning with his drive to Lancaster Gate with Cecily. His pride shrank from admitting that he had been wrong, while his sense of justice accused him. Cecily’s words came back to him. “Do you remember my surprise when you asked Dick Mayne to the house?” It was true,--that, and more than that. He winced as he thought of all that had been at least tacitly included in his invitation to the man whose presence he now resented. He looked back upon it as one recalls a fit of half-remembered delirium. How madly, in those days, he had loved Philippa! How she had filled for him heaven and earth, so that he would have risked anything, stooped to any baseness, to make her as fully his as he longed to make her! And now? He scarcely knew whether he loved her at all. He had been enraged at the sight of Nevern, certainly, but was it because he loved her? Wasn’t it rather blind resentment against the suspicion of betrayal, by Philippa at least, since Cecily no longer cared; a mad determination not to be abandoned, cast off by both women? He felt like a gambler who always loses, while his fellow-gamblers have all the luck. Lady Wilmot’s chatter beat through his brain incessantly. “Mayne, of course.” So people were really talking! He raged to know with how much truth. Then came the remembrance of her incessant harping upon his wife’s success, and its effect upon his vanity. Shame at his own lack of generosity struggled in vain with the knowledge that Lady Wilmot was right. With whatever injustice, with whatever lack of generosity, he _did_ resent it, even though the resentment was touched with admiration and an odd sort of pride. Robert had never achieved self-analysis quite so free from self-deception, as during that short walk under the dreaming trees. The keeper on the other side of the Park was waiting to shut the gate as he reached Hyde Park Corner, and a glance at the clock showed him that it wanted a minute to twelve. Mechanically, seeing nothing, he walked down Grosvenor Road, and on into Victoria Street, where, though the omnibuses had ceased to run, cabs still wandered, or passed one another at full speed, while an occasional motor-car shot amongst them. As he turned out of the street into the stillness of Carlisle Place, his eyes fell upon the Cathedral tower, majestic against the night sky sown with stars. Like Cecily, he felt its quietude, but only as something which accentuated the restless, uneasy tumult of his thoughts. Upstairs, when he reached the flat, the light was burning in the hall. Cecily had not returned. He felt vaguely relieved as he went straight to his room and shut the door. CHAPTER XVIII