connection with Essie herself. That, he now recognised, was his main
desire. The affair had actually died before Phebe; but its onerous
consequences remained, blighting the future.

The future! It was that, he now discovered, which occupied him, rather
than the past. A new need had become apparent, a restless desire
analogous to the urge of seeking youth. Jasper Penny was aware of a
great dissatisfaction, a vast emptiness, in his existence; he had a
feeling of waste growing out of the sense of hurrying years. Somehow,
obscurely, he had been cheated. He almost envied the commonality of men,
not, like himself, black Pennys, impatient of assuaging relationships
and beliefs. Yet this, too, turned into another phase of his
inheritance--his need was not material, concrete, it had no worldly,
graspable implications, and his general contempt was not less but
greater. He wished to bring a final justification to his isolation
rather than lose himself in the wide, undistinguished surge of living.

"You'll stop at the Jannans?" his mother queried.

"I think not, probably Sanderson's Hotel, Stephen is giving a ball
to-night for Graham and his wife. I have some important transactions."
Not an echo of his affair with Essie Scofield had, he knew, penetrated
to Myrtle Forge. It was a most fortunate accident. The vulgarity
consequent upon discovery would have been unbearable. Stephen Jannan,
his cousin, a lawyer of wide city connections, must have learned
something of the truth; but Stephen, properly, had said nothing; a
comfortable obscurity had hid him from gabbled scandal. Now, soon, it
would all be over. Unconsciously he drew a deeper breath of relief, of
prospective freedom.