Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/135

 business, already too long deferred, connected with the succession which had made him a rich man and brought him home, could only rebel mutely against the ill-fortune which left him solitary at a time when he most longed for fellowship, acknowledging the while, with a touch of self-reproach, that the position which he resented was very largely due to his own shortcomings; he had always figured as a lamentably bad correspondent, and his inveterate aversion to letter-writing had allowed the links of many old friendships to fall asunder, had operated to leave such friends as were still in touch with him in ignorance of his home-coming.

Now, as he paused in the hall of his club to light a cigarette before passing out into the pleasant July twilight, he told himself that for the present he had done with London; he would shake the dust of the inhospitable city from off his feet, and go down to the place in Wiltshire which was learning to call him master, to await better days in company with his beloved falcons. He even found himself taking comfort from this prospect while a hansom bore him swiftly to the Savoy Theatre, and when he was safely ensconced in his stall he beguiled the interval before the rising of the curtain—a period which his impatience to escape from the club rather than any undue passion for punctuality had made somewhat lengthy—by considering, speculatively, the chances of society which the Willescombe neighbourhood seemed to afford. He enjoyed the first act of the extravaganza with the zest of a man to whom the work of the famous collaborators was an entire novelty, his pleasure unalloyed by the fact, of which he was blissfully unconscious, that one of the principal parts was played by an understudy. His ennui returning with the fall of the curtain, he prepared to spend the entr'acte in contemplation of the people who composed the house, rather than to incur the resentment of the placid dowagers who were his neighbours, by passing and repassing, like