She left him, and he lingered for a moment scratching the ground with his stick. Then he went on his way to the Langham. He was not whistling now. He ran up against an old gentleman.
"Look out where you're going, my boy!" the old man said angrily. "Dreaming, I suppose. Boys didn't dream in my time. I've no patience with this generation."
At the hotel he saw Katharine, who was standing in the hall giving some instructions to the porter. She had just come back from the Tonedales, whom she had left as soon as she could. She had been thinking of him all the time, of him and his father and that metallic woman; and she could not rest until she was back again at the Langham, mounting guard, as it were, over these strangers who had come so unexpectedly into her life. She greeted the boy and spoke some kindly words, which brought a faint smile into his face.
But he slipped away from her, and locked himself up in his room.
[CHAPTER XI.]
Katharine spent that night wondering what she could say to Professor Thornton to warn him against Mrs Stanhope's biting tongue. She felt that she must warn him, even at the risk of seeming to intrude on the privacy of his personal concerns. She believed that it would be the part of a coward to shirk the task, and yet she dreaded to undertake it. She said to herself a hundred times over that there was no reason why she should interfere; they were nothing to her—these strangers, their troubles, their tragedy were nothing to her. That was the common-sense way of looking at the whole matter. They had their own lives to live. And she had hers. In a day or two their chance companionship would be a thing of the past. Why should she be troubled about them? Willy Tonedale was right. One could not take every one's burden and carry it. Ah, there was no common-sense about the matter; but there was something else, something infinitely more compelling than calm reason—the heart's insistence.
"I must tell him," she said. And her heart was lighter when she decided that. Then came the difficulty of deciding what to say. She did not solve that problem. She fell asleep and dreamed, and when she awoke, she said:
"What was it I dreamed I said to him? Ah, I remember I said that——Ah! it has gone again."
But it came back to her when she stood with Clifford Thornton alone in the reading-room. She made no preliminaries, she offered no excuses; she behaved exactly as though nothing else could be done by her in the circumstances, as though he and she were in some desolate region alone together, and she saw some terrible danger threatening him, and cried:
"Look out! Beware!"