As a rule the psychological moments of life come and go so quietly that their passing attracts little notice. Quite minor happenings give rise to demonstrations of excitement, of joy, of loudly voiced approbation or disappointment. But the moments which really matter in a life, which mark an epoch or destroy a dream, pass as a rule so quietly that only those whose dreams are shattered, or whose lives have been touched with the glory of the immortal, know that for a brief instant Time has become interchangeable with Eternity; that in the space of sixty fleeting seconds whole cycles of life have been lived through, and a vast and yawning gulf, in thought, in feeling, in spiritual growth or mental outlook, has opened to divide this moment from the one which directly preceded it.
Such a moment was this one in which the two men who were bound together by so tragic a link came face to face in Chloe Carstairs' drawing-room.
Each had been quite sincere in his dread of any future meeting; but whereas Bruce Cheniston had been the victim of as cruel a circumstance as ever deprived lover of his beloved, Anstice was the more to be pitied, inasmuch as to his own burden of regret must be added the knowledge that through his premature action he had given another man the right to execrate his name so long as they both should live.
For a second Anstice wondered, growing cold whether Cheniston would refuse to shake hands with him. In his heart he knew quite well, had always known, that he had not been to blame in that bygone episode; that although he had done a thing which must haunt him for the rest of his life by reason of its tragic uselessness, as a man in whom a woman had trusted he had had no alternative but to act as he had acted.
Yet of all men on earth Cheniston might well question the necessity of his action; and Anstice told himself with a fast-beating heart that he would have no right to resentment should the other refuse to take his hand, to sit at meat with the man who had deprived Hilda Ryder of her share in the gracious inheritance of life in the world she had called so beautiful.
For a second, indeed, Cheniston himself hesitated, checked in the friendly greeting he had been about to bestow on his sister's visitor. He had arrived late that evening, and had been dismissed to dress with the hasty information that two guests were expected to dinner, but he had had no idea of the last arrival's identity; and to him, too, the meeting brought back with horrible poignancy that last bitter interview in the haunted East.