“Bah! I am trying to justify my passion for that girl—that is what I am doing!” he cried to himself in an excess of self-anger. “I want to justify my unfaithfulness to Lilia, whom, if this is love, I never loved! God! I would die a thousand times for this girl—she has me, soul, body, all!”
No more would he deceive himself. He knew now—he knew that he was in the grasp of the one great passion of his whole life.
What should he do? Fly? To-morrow, if he chose, he could cancel all engagements, cast off all responsibilities, leave all arrangements to his lawyer, and start for—anywhere—without detriment to his one duty in life—Ralph. His father was dead, his sisters absorbed in their husbands and families. He had no ties. Would it not be best to turn his back upon his great temptation?
He resisted the thought. The fact was, he shrank from the daily and hourly struggle against the longing for Mercedes’ presence which he felt would arise when he had cut himself adrift.
“I am exaggerating the situation,” he told himself, summoning his ordinary common sense to his aid. “It throws one off one’s mental balance to be confronted by such a coincidence as my dreaming of that fantastic stuff years before the man wrote it.”
Meanwhile he felt as if he would like to see Helven again. The feeling was so strong next morning that after he had finished his hospital work he drove to the publishers of the book his thoughts had so curiously anticipated, to obtain its author’s address.
The address was a street in Bloomsbury. With the new instinct to hide his doings dominating him, Dr. Paull would not drive there in his own carriage.
He telegraphed to Helven asking him for an audience that evening. The reply arrived during the afternoon:
“With pleasure—at eight.—Helven.”
So, with an excuse for his absence to Ralph, at twenty minutes to eight Hugh strolled out of the house, and hailing a hansom in Oxford street, drove to Blank street, Bloomsbury.