‘Thank you,’ Alice whispered with a catch in her throat, and stood up too. Theodore was left to finish off his wine and his lobster salad in earnest solitude, with flecks of shellfish in his beard, while Collis and Alice joined the dancing. He raised his head from time to time to see where they were, and he couldn’t help noticing how calm Collis looked, how self-contained, as if he had emptied himself of any regret for Hannah, or any pain for Delphine. He couldn’t help noticing, either, how Alice danced as if she were dreaming and how the glittering White House chandeliers found reflections in her eyes.

It was a few minutes after midnight when Senator Stride’s carriage rolled up to the door of the house on Eighteenth Street, and Collis and Theodore and Alice alighted. A kerosene lamp was flickering above the porch, but there were no lights along the street. The carriage rolled around the block to the stables, while Collis escorted Alice up the steps to the door, and knocked. Theodore had drunk half a bottle of wine too many, and stood on the sidewalk trying to fasten his evening cape with careful and incapable dignity.

Hubert, the manservant, opened the door. But as Alice stepped inside, and Collis took off his hat to bid her good night, a tall figure appeared in the hall-way behind him. It was Senator Stride, in a dressing-gown and fez, and he looked as if he was just about to retire to bed.

‘Is that Mr Edmonds I see there?’ the Senator asked loudly.

‘Yes, Father,’ said Alice. ‘We’ve had a very pleasant evening.’

‘Well, now, Mr Edmonds,’ said the Senator, crossing the hall and coming up to the front door. ‘The last time I heard anyone talk of you, you’d gone to California with your washbowl on your knee. Didn’t you care for it there, or wouldn’t they have you?’

He gave a deep, genial laugh. He hadn’t changed. He was as saturnine and craggy as ever, and his eyes were still shadowed and dark.

‘I went to California to rebuild the fortune that my father had unhappily lost in New York,’ Collis said coldly. ‘No thanks to you, I might say.’

‘Oh, you shouldn’t take it so personal,’ said Senator Stride. ‘Politics and finance, well, they’re both battles of a kind, running battles, and folks tend to get hurt in battles. It’s the way of the world.’

‘Getting hurt is one thing,’ said Collis. ‘Getting killed is another. My father died when I. P. Woolmer’s went down, and you could have saved him. Worse than that, I. P. Woolmer’s brought down Ohio Mutual, too, and that drove poor George Spooner to madness, which is worse than death, in its way.’