"Do you want me to?" she said, pushing her hair back from her forehead and gazing at him anxiously.
"Yes, I do."
She nodded. "I'll stay," she said curtly.
And then she lapsed once more into her former state of silence and sullenness; and Hubert left her with a smile of farewell and a secret aspiration that he might not see her again; for it seemed to him that he could never look upon the face of Andrew Westwood's daughter without a pang.
He decided to catch the seven o'clock train to London.
"You'll be late for your engagement, I am afraid," Mrs. Rumbold said to him; thinking of his excuse for running away.
He only smiled and nodded as he walked off, by way of reply. His dinner in town, he knew well enough, would be eaten in solitude at his club. He had no other engagement; but he would have invented half a hundred excuses sooner than stay an hour longer than was necessary under General Vane's hospitable roof.
He dined silently and expeditiously at his club, and then made his way through the lighted streets to his lodgings in Bloomsbury. A barrister by profession, he had found his real vocation in literature, and he liked to live within easy reach of libraries and newspaper offices. He had been making a fair income lately, and his earnings were very acceptable to him, for he was not a man of particularly economical habits. He had about a hundred a year of his own, and Miss Vane allowed him another hundred—all else had to be won by the work of his own hands. And yet, as he passed up the staircase to his own rooms, he was wondering whether he could not manage to dispense with Miss Vane's hundred a year.
He had let himself in with his latch-key, and the room which he entered was lighted only by the lamps in the street. He had not been expected so early, and his landlady had forgotten to bring the lamp which he was in the habit of using. He struck a match and lit the gas, pulled down the blinds, and threw himself with a heavy sigh into the great leathern arm-chair that stood before his writing-table.
He felt mortally tired. The events of the day had been such as would have tried a strong man's nerve, and Hubert Lepel was at this time out of sorts, physically as well as mentally. He had seldom gone through such hours of keen torture as he had borne that day; and his face—pale, worn, miserable—seemed to have lost all its youth as he lay back in the great arm-chair and thought of the past.