Night had fallen when they left the club-house and the forward lamps of the car cut a broad path of light over the snow. Wayne adjusted one of the movable seats in the tonneau so that he faced the two women, and turned on the electric light. The thing had its ridiculous side; the pains Mrs. Craighill was taking to be polite to the girl struck him as funny; but by the time the car reached the highway more serious reflections engaged him. Jean Morley’s account of her walk afield was plausible enough and he did not question it; he wondered whether Mrs. Craighill’s story had carried equal conviction. An effort to assure himself that it was not important what the girl thought, found him looking straight into her eyes, whose gray-blue depths and sorrowful wistfulness seemed more fathomless than at any of their previous meetings. Her knowing Joe, the ball player and chauffeur--the man who now guided them home--added a puzzling factor; they were utterly irreconcilable characters. His glance rested first on one woman and then the other as he unconsciously compared them--Mrs. Craighill, trim and smart, with the girl, whose shabby, discoloured gloves, her plain little hat with its rumpled feather, her cheap coat, were vesture of a different world. Only an hour before he had kissed the one; he had held her unresisting in his arms; she was pretty, charming amusing, but the glow of the afternoon had paled; their adventure had ended on a frightened, smothered half-note. He had been checked in the course he had marked for himself; whirled out of the straight current into the labouring waters of indecision. He had resolved upon an evil thing; he had hoisted sail and steered for the rocks, but the plunging depths might not be so attainable after all! That potential superstition, latent in us all, and to which strong men are often susceptible, teased him with questions as to why this girl had walked into his life. There, too, was Paddock, the clerical sentimentalist. Only a little while before Paddock had crossed the threshold of his office and struck down, in effect, the cup with which he was about to consecrate his life to evil things. It is the way of the guilty to take counsel of omens; the knocking at the gate in Macbeth is the loud beating of every conscience-struck heart. Wayne’s imagination played upon the figure of Jean Morley, drifting through the storm to the remote house where a woman, weak as he was weak, yielded herself to a kiss he had calculated in coldest reason.