As Lenox pondered over these things it seemed to him that, let Mr. Incoul suspect what he might, the one and unique cause for apprehension lay in the attitude which Maida had assumed when her husband, after closing the door, had gone to her in search of an explanation. That he had so gone there was to him no possible doubt. And it was in the expectancy of tidings as to the result of that explanation that he waited the entire day in his room.
But the afternoon waned into dusk and still no tidings came. As the hours wore on his uneasiness decreased. "Bah!" he muttered to himself at last, "in the winter I gave all my mornings to Pyrrho and Ænesidemus, and here six months later during an entire day I bother myself about eventualities."
He sighed wearily with an air of self-disgust, and rising from the sofa on which his meditations had been passed he went to the window. The Casino opposite was already illuminated. "They will be there to-night," he thought. "I have been a fool for my pains. If Maida hasn't written it is because there has been nothing to write. I will look them up after dinner and everything will be as before." He took off his morning suit and got himself into evening dress. He tied his white cravat without emotion, with a precision that was geometric in its accuracy, and to hold the tie in place he ran a silver pin through the collar without so much as pricking his neck. He was thoroughly at ease. The fear of the blow had passed. Pyrrho, Ænesidemus, the whole corps of ataraxists had surged suddenly and rescued him from the toils of the inscrutable.
At a florist's in the street below he found an orchid with which he decked his button-hole, and then in search of dinner he sauntered into Helder's, a restaurant on the main street, a trifle above the Grand Hôtel. It was crowded; there did not seem to be a single table unoccupied. He hesitated for a moment, and was about to go elsewhere when he noticed some one signaling to him from the remoter end of the garden. He could not at first make out who it was and it was not until he had made use of a monocle that he recognized a fellow Baltimorean, Mr. Clarence May, with whom in days gone by he had been on terms approaching those of intimacy.