"You're going upstairs now?" he suggested, as though about to open the door.
"I'm going, but I'm not going upstairs to-night," she answered as she rose. "I shall go and write a letter or two instead."
He bowed politely as she passed out of the room. Then he sat down at the table again and rested his head on both his hands. It took long—it took a very long while. She was hard to subdue. Hard it was too to subdue himself—to be always courteous, never more than permissibly ironical, to wait for his victory. Yet not a doubt crossed his mind that he was on the right track, that he must succeed in the end, that plain reason and good sense must win the day. But the fight was very long. His face looked haggard in the light as he sat alone by the table and told himself to persevere.
And Sibylla, confirmed in her despair, bitterly resentful of the terms he had proposed, seeing the hopelessness of her life, fearing to look on the face of her child lest the pain should rend her too pitilessly, sat down and wrote her answer to Walter Blake. The answer was the promise he had asked.
The images had done their work—hers of him and his of her—and young Blake's fancy picture of himself.
CHAPTER XIII
THE DEAD AND ITS DEAD
"Well, have you managed to amuse yourself to-day?" asked Caylesham, throwing himself heavily on a sofa by Tom Courtland, and yawning widely.
He had dropped in at Mrs. Bolton's, after dinner. Tom had spent the day there, and had not managed to amuse himself very much, as the surly grunt with which he answered Caylesham's question sufficiently testified. He had eaten too much lunch, played cards too long and too high, with too many "drinks" interspersed between the hands; then had eaten a large dinner, accompanied by rather too much champagne; then had played cards again till both his pocket and his temper were the worse. There had been nothing startling, nothing lurid about his day; it had just been unprofitable, boring, unwholesome. And he did not care about Mrs. Bolton's friends—not about Miss Pattie Henderson, nor about the two quite young men who had made up the card-party. His face was a trifle flushed, and his toothbrushy hair had even more than usual of its suggestion of comical distress.
"Been a bit dull, has it?" Caylesham went on sympathetically. "Well, it often is. Oh, I like our friend Flora Bolton, you know, so long as she doesn't get a fit of nerves and tell you how different she might have been. People should never do that. At other times she's a good sort, and just as ready to ruin herself as anybody else—nothing of the good old traditional harpy about her. Still perhaps it works out about the same."
It certainly worked out about the same, as nobody knew better than Tom Courtland. He was thinking now that he had paid rather high for a not very lively day. The only person he had won from was Miss Henderson, and he was not sure that she would pay.