The big man gave a sigh of relief. "Well, you manage as you think best," he said. "Confound him! He deserves all he gets--let's change the subject. It's a little too Adelphi-like to be amusing." "I am going to hear Pachmann in the St. James's Hall. Will you come?" Llwellyn considered a moment. "No, I don't think I will. I'm going out to a supper-party in St. John's Wood later--Charlie Fitzgerald's, the lessee of the Piccadilly. I shall go home and read a novel quietly. To tell the truth, I feel rather depressed, too. Everything seems going too well, doesn't it?" Schuabe's voice shook a little as he replied shortly. For a brief moment the veil was raised. Each saw the other with eyes full of the fear that was lurking within them. For weeks they had been at cross purposes, simulating a courage and indifference they did not feel. Now each knew the truth. They knew that the burden of their terrible secret was beginning to press and enclose them with its awful weight. Each had imagined the other free from his own terror, that terror that lifts up its head in times of night and silence, the dread Incubus that murders sleep. The two men went out of the club together without speaking. Their hearts were beating like drums within them; it was the beginning of the agony. * * * * * Llwellyn, his coat exchanged for a smoking jacket, lay back in a leather chair in his library. Since his return from Palestine he had transferred most of his belongings to a small flat in New Bond Street. He hardly ever visited his wife now. The flat in Bloomsbury Court Mansions had been given up when Gertrude Hunt had gone. In New Bond Street Sir Robert lived alone. A housekeeper in the basement of the buildings looked after his rooms and his valet slept above. The new _pied à terre_ was furnished with great luxury. It was not the garish luxury and vulgar splendour of Bloomsbury Court--that had been the dancer's taste. Here Llwellyn had gathered round him all that could make life pleasant, and his own taste had seen to everything. As he sat alone, slightly recovered from the nervous shock of the dinner, but in an utter depression of spirits, his thoughts once more went back to his lost mistress. It was in times like these that he needed her most. She would distract him, amuse him, where a less vulgar, more intellectual woman would have increased his boredom. He sighed heavily, pitying himself, utterly unconscious of his degradation. The books upon the shelves, learned and weighty monographs in all languages, his own brilliant contributions to historical science among them, had no power to help him. He sighed for his rowdy Circe. The electric bell of the flat rang sharply outside in the passage. His man was out, and he rose to answer it himself.