Her George clanged the bell with a furious stroke that brought Mrs. Pinking in panic up the stairs. Holding himself very straight, speaking in sentences short and hard, paying to his Mary no smallest attention, he made the arrangements. Miss Humfray would take on her bedroom again. By the week. If Mrs. Pinking would be so kind as to allow them the same terms. He thanked her. That was settled, then. He would look in in the morning. He would say good night, Mrs. Pinking.
Mrs. Pinking gave him good night; busied herself with the tea-things.
Her presence enabled this brutal George to preserve his stony bearing; denied his pretty Mary opportunity to melt him with her tears.
Hard as flint, “Well, good night,” he said to her. “I'll look in to-morrow morning.”
Upon a little sniff, “Good night,” she whispered; strangled an “Oh, George! George!”
She followed him to the door. He was down the stairs before she could command her voice for: “Where shall you go, George?”
With the reckless fury of one who sets forth to plunge into the river, he called back, “I? I? Oh, anywhere—anywhere. Who cares where I go?”
The hall door slammed.
Late into that night while a young woman sobbed her pretty eyes out upon a pillow in a back room of Meath Street, Battersea, a young man, who furiously had been pacing London, paced and repaced the street from end to end, gazing the windows of the house where she lay. This young man muttered, gesticulated, groaned. “Oh, damn!” was his song. “Oh, Mary! Oh, what a cursed brute I am!”