He opened the door there. Machin met him at the door. Each withdrew from
the other, avoiding a collision.

"Your mistress returned?"

"Yes, sir." Machin seemed to hesitate, her mind disturbed.

"Where is she?"

"I was just coming to tell you, sir. She told me to say that she was
lying down."

"Oh!"

Disdaining further to interrogate the servant, he hurried upstairs. He
had to excuse himself to Eve, and he had also to justify to her the
placing of eighty thousand pounds in a scheme which she could not
possibly understand and for which there was nothing whatever to show.
She would approve, of course; she would say that she had complete
confidence in his sagacity, but all the inflections of her voice, all
her gestures and glances, would indicate to him that in her opinion he
was a singularly ingenuous creature, the natural prey of sharpers, and
that the chances of their not being ruined by his incurable simplicity
were exceedingly small. His immense reputation in the Treasury, his
sinister fame as the Terror of the departments, would not weigh an atom
in her general judgment of the concrete case affecting the fortunes of
the Prohack family. Then she would be brave; she would be bravely
resigned to the worst. She would kiss his innocence. She would quite
unconvincingly assure him, in her own vocabulary, that he was a devil of
a fellow and the smartest man in the world.