He did not answer them, but doggedly pursued his way.
"My punishment has come," he thought. "I have no wish to live, nor do I desire to outlast this day."
Once only, of his own prompting, did he pause. A woman, with little children clinging to her, passed him, sobbing bitterly. His eyes happening to light upon her face, he saw in it some likeness to the peasant girl whom in years gone by he had betrayed. The likeness might or might not have been there, but it existed certainly in his fancy. He stopped and questioned her, and learned that she had been utterly ruined by the storm, her cottage destroyed, her small savings lost, and all her hopes blasted. He emptied his pockets of money, and gave her what valuables he had about him.
"Sell them," he said; "they will help to purchase you a new home."
She called down blessings on his head.
"If she knew me for what I am," he muttered as he left her, "she would curse me."
On and on he struggled and seemed to make no progress. The afternoon was waning, and the clouds were growing blacker and thicker, when he saw a man staggering towards him. He was about to put a question to him respecting the locality of the House of White Shadows--his course had been so devious that he scarcely knew in what direction it lay--when a closer approach to the man showed him to be no other than John Vanbrugh.
"Ah!" cried Vanbrugh, seizing the Advocate's arm, and thus arresting his steps, "I feared we had lost you. A fine time I have had of it down in your villa yonder! Had it not been for the storm, I should have been bundled before a magistrate on a charge of interloping; but everybody had enough to do to look after himself. It was a case of the devil take the hindmost. A scurvy trick, though, of yours, to desert a comrade; still, for my sake, I am glad to see you in the land of the living."
"Have you come straight from the villa?" asked the Advocate.
"Straight!" cried Vanbrugh with a derisive laugh. "I defy the soberest saint to walk straight for fifty yards in such a hurricane. Three bottles of wine would not make me so unsteady as this cursed wind--enough to stop one's breath for good or ill. What! you are not going on?"