"Do you think Ora will come back?" she asked. "If she's successful she may stay."
"Oh, she'll come," he nodded. "We shall have her back in Chelsea before six months are out."
"And when she does?"
Irene's curiosity had overcome her, but Ashley laughed again as he answered, "Ascribe what emotions you like to me, Lady Bowdon; but I haven't heard that Jack Fenning's health's failing."
There was some pretence about the attitude so puzzling and exasperating to Irene Bowdon, but more of reality. The passing of the months had brought a sense of remoteness; it was intensified by a gradual cessation of the interchange of letters. Ora had told him that she seemed to have got into another world and was lonely; she was, without doubt, still in another world; whether still lonely he could not tell. She was in all senses a long way off; what he had chosen, or at least accepted as the lesser evil, was happening; she and her life were diverging from him and his life. He recognised all this very clearly as he ate his chop at the club that evening. She had found him living one life; she had given him another while she was with him; she left him a third different from either of the other two. That evening, whether from some mood of his own or because of what Irene had said, she seemed irrevocably departed and separated from him. But even in that hour she was to come back to him so as to be very near in feeling though still across the seas in fact.
As he turned into his street about ten o'clock and approached the door of his house, he perceived a man walking slowly up and down, to and fro. There was something familiar in the figure and the gait; an indecision, a looseness, a plaintive weakness. Unconsciously Ashley quickened his step; he had a conviction which seemed absurd and was against all probability; a moment would prove or disprove its truth. The man came under the gas lamp, stopped, and looked up at Ashley's windows. His face was plain to see now. "By God, it is!" whispered Ashley Mead, with a frown and a smile. A little more slinking, a little more slouching, a little more altogether destitute of the air which should mark a self-respecting man, but unchanged save for these intensifications of his old characteristics, Jack Fenning stood and looked up at the house whence he had once come out richer by a thousand pounds than when he went in. He seemed to regard the dingy old walls with a maudlin affection.
It was a pretty bit of irony that she should come back in this way; that this aspect of her, this side of her life, should be thrust before Ashley's eyes when all that he loved of her and longed for was so far away. Ashley walked up to Jack Fenning with lips set firm in a stiff smile.
"Well, Mr. Fenning, what brings you here?" he asked. "I've no more thousands about me, you know."
"I—I thought you might give me a drink for old friendship," said Jack. "They said you were out, and wouldn't let me sit in your room. So I said I'd come back; but I've been waiting all the time."