"What is the use of having a special wire if you don't use it?" she said. "Have you had your dinner?"
"Oh, yes," he replied, though he had eaten nothing since the morning.
Lady Denby looked at him curiously.
"You are not looking very well, Yorke," she said. "You seem tired and fagged, and a change is what you want."
"Well, I shall get it directly," he said, with unconscious grimness. "Which way has Eleanor gone? I'll see if I can find her."
"She said something about going to the village," Lady Denby replied; "but I don't expect she will get beyond the grounds. Have some coffee or something."
He mixed a brandy and soda, more to please her than himself, and then went out.
Remembering what Lady Denby had said, he should have kept to the park, but he was not thinking of Lady Eleanor or the way she had taken, and he went straight out of the gate and along the road to the village.
He was thinking, alas! not of the woman he was going to marry in two days' time, but of Leslie Lisle; thinking that, perhaps, some day he should meet her. What would he say to her then? Would it be just simply "How do you do, Miss Lisle?" and go on his way again? Ah, no! Let him meet her when he might, sooner or later he would have to tell her how they had been separated, and why, when the knowledge of Finetta's perfidy had come to him, it was too late to go back to her! He would have to tell her that, would have to clear himself in her eyes!
He walked on, wrapt in bitter thoughts, haunted by the spectre which takes the shape of 'It might have been,' and found himself far on the London Road. He had, all unconsciously, passed the village, and he would have still kept striding along, but that a heavy shower, which had been threatening for some time, came pelting down. So he turned back at a slower pace, and, as most men do when they are getting wet, thought of a pipe.