"My sweetest pet, this being with you is pretty well driving me mad with impatience to get rid of that cat of a woman who keeps us apart," he told her, as, after they had had a little fête champêtre of cold chicken and champagne, he lounged at her side in a boat drawn up under the willows of a little creek. "So I have made up my mind to set about it at once! What do you say?"
"Dearest!" was all she could reply. Her beautiful blue eyes gazed at him through a mist of emotion. How deliriously dainty she looked--flickering shadows cast by the willow branches on her petite, white-clad figure--the heat of a mid-summer noon bringing a rich rose glow to her rounded cheeks, so much more delicately pretty without war-paint.
"It will necessitate my being absent for a little while, but that you must not mind," he went on, judicially, resting his head on her shoulder and thinking what a wonderful provision of Nature it was--this unbounded credulity of enamoured women. Did they really believe in their men, he wondered, a little contemptuously--or did their frantic desire for their love to be returned swallow up everything that stood in its way? "When one wants a good thing, one must be content to make a little sacrifice for it, eh, darling? I don't think you are as selfish as most of your sex, I will say that for you!"
She glanced at him gratefully. One word of praise from his lips recompensed her for all the drudgery, hard work, and mental suffering of the past years--when, not knowing where he was or what had become of him--whether he was dead or in prison, or fallen among thieves in some unreachable country--she had slaved and toiled nearly the four-and-twenty hours through to keep a home together in which, some day, to welcome back the wanderer, or even the total wreck of him.
"And now you must help me in something," he went on, sliding his arm about her slender waist and looking up into her face with those sinister, penetrating black eyes, which were, perhaps, the deterrent when dogs growled and snarled at, and children fled from, him. "I am not one of those silly men who talk about their business--who chatter, prate, prattle, and do nothing!--I say little--but act! (The secret of successful life, my dear!) I have not been idle since I returned with the hope of winning you for my wife. Already I have found out much of the woman who was my ruin for a time with her unscrupulous devilry, which will help me immensely to free myself from that obnoxious tie. But I have still to see a very important witness against her, and I can only see the man at my leisure at home. Do you think that if I appoint to-morrow night, you can persuade mother to go to the theatre with you?"
"Don't you know? She is going to the entertainment given for the patients at the Hospital," returned Vera, eagerly. "That will be the very thing for you! You will have the house to yourself. Mr. Dobson is going, of course!" (Mr. Dobson was a student lodger).
"Everything smiles upon us, my love," he said, tenderly, grimly congratulating himself on his good luck. And he gave himself up to love-making for the remainder of the summer afternoon--returning earlier than he had intended, though, to write that letter to Joan: the letter which Julie brought among others to her bedside, and which she read with blanched cheeks and sinking heart:--
"You must not go to the old place, but come to me here, to-morrow night, Wednesday, at nine. If you fail, I intend to call upon you without demur, and at all risk. Take a cab to the corner of Westminster Bridge, the other side of the river, and then inquire for Haythorn Street.
- a'COURT."
CHAPTER XIV