All this imaginary restitution was perfectly reasonable. I could "see" things happening just as I had thought them. The only trouble was that I could find no personal satisfaction in the consideration of the Jervaises' restored happiness. I was aware of a feeling of great disappointment for which I could not account; and although I tried to persuade myself that this feeling was due to the evaporation of the emotional interest of the moving drama that had been playing, I found that explanation insufficient. I was conscious of a loss that intimately concerned myself, the loss of something to which I had been unconsciously looking forward. I came out of my reverie to find that I had wandered half round the house, across the formal pleasance, and that I was now at the door leading into the kitchen garden. I hesitated a moment with a distinct sense of wrong-doing, before I opened the door with the air of one who defies his own conscience, and passed up the avenue between the gouty espaliers--fine old veterans they were, and as I could see, now, loaded with splendid fruit. The iron gates that led out into the Park were locked, but a gardener--the head gardener, I suppose--came out of one of the greenhouses close at hand, and let me through. I began to hurry, then. It was already twenty past twelve, and lunch was at half-past one. Just what I proposed to do, or whom I expected to see, at the Home Farm, I had no idea; but I was suddenly determined to get there and back before lunch. The walk would not take me more than a quarter of an hour each way, but, for no reason that I could explain, the balance of half an hour or so that remained to me appeared far too short. I remember that as I walked through the wood, I persuaded myself that I wanted to see Arthur Banks, who, according to my neat and convincing theory, had taken up his work again and was, therefore, probably at the Hall. But, as I have said, our impulses are never guided, and seldom altered, by that form of reasoning known as logic. * * * * * But I never reached the farm, and I forgot all about the pretended motive of my excursion. For in two seconds I came to an entirely new judgment on the whole problem of the Jervaise-Banks intrigue, a judgment that had nothing in common with any earlier turns of sympathy from one party to the other.