It was noon before that initial high tension fried itself in its own juices. With the lengthening day Conkling grew, if not calmer, at least more coherent, and afterthought paced sedulously at his elbow. He began to see difficulties and dangers. The disturbing thought of even a second Alcazar crept into his mind, for such a thing as insurance, of course, had never entered the heads of those two old incompetents of the manor-house. Then his attention swung away from the Titian and centered more and more on Julia Keswick. He had no liking for the situation in which she had been left, short-lived as it was bound to prove. She was as wonderful, in a way, as the Titian itself. In many ways she was much more wonderful. She had been tragically held in, repressed, walled up with her own self-communing young soul. But the potentialities were there, and he was to throw open the gates of life for her. He had already seen knowledge come to that intent and eager young face. The memory of it, in fact, still had the power to quicken his pulse. That had never happened to him before. It was something which he could not analyze, which he had no wish to analyze. Instinct, he felt, had already shown itself infallible. Besides being infallible, it was also incontestable. It had swept him, helpless, into a feverish and unexpected happiness. And that happiness, he told himself, was only the beginning. But now that the die had been cast, he had his obligations to the woman he loved. Yet he had passively left her in a situation which was anything but savory. She was a woman, in a way, but that house of hate, that atmosphere of fundamental intolerances, cramped her back into something akin to childhood. The memory of that raucous call bell began to grate on him. Equally distasteful to him grew the thought of her being confronted by two inquisitorial old tyrants who had stumbled across the new secret of her life. Their power to harm her was already gone. He would see to that promptly enough. But their power to make that day one of unhappiness for her remained still with them. He asked himself if she could possibly need him. And once that question had been put, his disquieted soul wondered if through the clairvoyance of passion she was not striving to reach him at that very moment, if she was not calling to him through the hot and lonely afternoon. He put a sudden end to those questionings and his own mounting unrest. He did so by climbing into his car and starting out for the Keswick home, and he was racing before he was half-way there as though some etheric summons kept reminding him that he must make up for lost time.