Indeed, it was necessary that he should be present and in attendance on
his _fiancêe_ who appeared at every function. Maude was now almost as
celebrated as Sir Stephen; for her beauty, her reputed wealth, and the
fact that she was engaged to the son of Sir Stephen, had raised her to
an exalted position in the fashionable world; and her name figured in
the newspapers very nearly as often as that of the great financier.
She had stepped from obscurity into that notoriety, for which we all of
us have such a morbid craving, almost in a single day; and she queened
it with a languid grace and self-possession which established her
position on a firm basis. Wherever she went she was the centre and
object of a small crowd of courtiers; the men admired her, and the
women envied her; for nowadays most women would rather marry wealth
than rank, unless the latter were accompanied by a long rent roll--and
in these hard times for landlords, too many English noblemen, have no
rent roll at all, short or long.
Excepting his father's, Stafford went to very few houses, and spent
most of his time, when not in attendance on Maude, in the solitude of
his own chambers, or in the smoking-room of one of the quietest of his
clubs. Short as the time had been, the matter of a few weeks only since
had parted from Ida, he had greatly changed; so changed that not seldom
the bright and buoyant and overbright Sir Stephen seemed to be younger
than his son. He was too busy, too absorbed in the pursuit of his
ambition, the skilful steering of the enterprise he had so successfully
launched to notice the change; but it was noticed by others, and
especially by Howard. Often he watched Stafford moving moodily about
his father's crowded rooms, with the impassive face which men wear when
they have some secret trouble or anxiety which they conceal as the
Spartan boy concealed the fox which was gnawing at his vitals; or
Howard came upon him in the corner of a half-darkened smoking-room,
with an expired cigar in his lips, and his eyes fixed on a newspaper
which was never turned.
By that unwritten code by which we are all governed nowadays, Howard
could not obtrude by questioning his friend, and Stafford showed no
signs of making any voluntary statement or explanation. He suffered in
a silence with which he kept at arm's-length even his closed friend;
and Howard pondered and worried in a futile attempt to guess at the
trouble which had changed Stafford from a light-hearted man, with an
immense capacity for pleasure, to a moody individual to whom the
pleasures of life seemed absolutely distasteful.