“A thousand hopes!” she said again.
I suppose he made some response, but in words he made none. The door closed behind him.
I put the atlas on the sofa by me, got up, and went to her.
“I suppose I may go now, too?” I said.
“How clever you’re growing, Mr Wynne! But just let him get out of the house. We mustn’t give it away.”
A moment or two we stood in silence. Then she said: “You understand things. You shall have a note too—and a thousand hopes. And—good-bye!”
Not a suspicion of the meaning of this afternoon’s scene crossed my mind, which fact proved me, I daresay, to be very stupid. But Val was hardly likely to see more clearly, and I can’t altogether justify the play she made with the atlas and Assiniboia. As an exercise in irony, however, it had its point.
VIII
I DO not know what was in Val’s note: more of good-bye, and more than a thousand hopes, I imagine. Is it fanciful to mark that she had always said “hope” and never “confidence”? Mine bade me be at a certain corner of a certain street at eleven-thirty. “Where you will find me. Say nothing about it.” It was a little hard to say nothing whatever to Jane.
I went and met them at the corner—Mrs Something Simpson, Kirby, and Miss Constantine. Thence we repaired to a registry office, and they (I do not include Mrs Simpson) were married. They were to sail from Liverpool that afternoon, and we went straight from the office to Euston. I think it was only when the question of luggage arose that I gasped out, “Where are you going?”