Was it perhaps passion! He began, standing there in the sunlight, to consider passion--as dispassionately as Aliette herself might have tried to consider it. (In deliberation of thought, they resembled each other, these two.) Although by no means an ascetic, he hated the abstract idea of passion, finding it rather indecent--like the letters not meant for public eyes which, defying the vigilance of solicitors, occasionally found their way into that stereotyped farce, the divorce court. And yet this emotion could hardly be other than passion. The blue eyes under the broad brow grew very serious. Inwardly Ronald Cavendish, despite his outward poise--the result of training--had remained extraordinarily young. "Passion," he thought; "how beastly." And for another man's wife! That made it impossible. That was why the emotion must be fought. He had been fighting it ever since they parted. But the emotion would not be conquered. At times it became an ache, a sheer physical ache. At such times--and one of them, he knew, was on him now--Ronnie conceived an amazing distrust of his own self-control; an amazing gladness that they had not met in London: although he had seen her, at a distance, more than once, walking across Hyde Park, a Great Dane dog at her heels. They looked, to his imagination, the tiniest mite forlorn--a little lonely woman (he always thought of her as little) with a big lonely hound. Invariably, the sight of her dispelled mere passion, melting it to a strange tenderness, akin to the tenderness he felt toward his mother. "Mr. James Wilberforce on the telephone, sir," announced Benjamin Bunce; and shattered introspection. Ronnie went outside to the communal telephone. "Hello, Ronnie." The solicitor's voice sounded irascible over the wire. "Hello, Jimmy; what's the trouble?" "The Ellerson case. Lady H. has got the wind up. She's with the pater now; wants to go and sit in court till the case comes on; wants a conference with Brunton; wants anything and everything. Of course we can't get hold of H. B. Can we bring her over to you?" "Bring her along, by all means," said the barrister. 2 The offices of Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright, which occupy three floors of a modern red-brick building at the foot of Norfolk Street, fifty yards from the Thames Embankment and the Temple station of the Underground, are rabbit-warrened by white-wood partitions and frosted glass doors into a maze of conflicting passages. On the top floor are the bookkeeping rooms, whence issue--still in stately clerical handwritings--those red-taped folioed bills ("To long and special interview when we informed you that we had taken counsel's opinion and he was of the opinion that . . .") which are never disputed though often delayed in payment by an aristocratic clientèle.