Mr. Mudge nodded his head.
"Very sure. I saw them together. I saw the look on Lady Stretton's face. It was a clear night. There was a lamp too, in the cab. I passed them as Callon got out and said 'Good-night.'"
Pamela sat down in a chair, and fixed her troubled eyes on her companion.
"Did they see you?"
Mr. Mudge smiled.
"No."
"Let me have the whole truth," cried Pamela, "Tell me the story from the beginning. How you came to see them--everything."
Mr. Mudge sat down in his turn. He presented to her a side of his character which she had not hitherto suspected. She listened, and was moved to sympathy, as no complaint could ever have moved her; and Mr. Mudge was the last man to complain. Yet the truth came out clearly. Outwardly prosperous and enviable, he had yet inwardly missed all. A man of so wide a business, so many undertakings, so occupied a life, it was natural to dissociate him from the ordinary human sympathies and desires. It seemed that he could have neither time nor inclination to indulge them. But here he was, as he had once done before, not merely admitting their existence within him, but confessing that they were far the greater part of him, and that because they had been thwarted, the prosperous external life of business to which he seemed so ardently enchained was really of little account, He spoke very simply. Pamela lost sight of the business machine altogether. Here was a man, like another, telling her that through his vain ambitions his life had gone astray. She found a pathos in the dull and unimpressive look of him--his bald, uncomely head, his ungraceful figure. There was a strange contrast between his appearance and the fanciful antidote for disappointment which had brought him into Regent's Park when Callon and Lady Stretton were discussing their future course.
"I told you something of my history at Newmarket," he said. "You must remember what I told you, or you will not understand."
"I remember very well," said Pamela, gently. "I think that I shall understand."