“After all,” he mused, over and over again, “that is the only probable, the only possible explanation. Is it likely that if anyone had the accursed thing they would keep it hidden? No! If they were honest, they would have declared it at once; if dishonest, they would have brought it to me and traded upon it. Yes, I was half mad that night. I must have destroyed it at the moment Laura knocked at the window.”
But all the same he determined to make his position secure. Immediately he had arranged matters at the Hurst he would go to London and marry Una.
“She is all safe and sound there,” he mused, with a satisfied smile. “My mother leads the life of a hermit. The girl herself has no friends—not one single soul in London. I shall be her only friend, and—the rest is easy.”
Poor Stephen!
Then he would give a passing thought to Laura, and now and then would take from his pocket half a dozen letters, which she had written to him since the night of her journey to Hurst.
To not one of these had he replied, and the last was dated a week back.
“By this time,” he thought, “she has forgotten me, or what is better, has learned that plain Stephen Davenant and Squire Davenant of Hurst Leigh are two very different men. Poor Laura! Well, well, I must do something for her. I’ll make her a handsome present. Say a thousand pounds; perhaps find a husband for her. She’s a sensible girl, too sensible to dream that I should think of marrying her now. After all, what harm is done? We were very happy, and amused ourselves with innocent flirtation. A mere flirtation, that is all.”
And he tried to forget the pale face and flashing eyes which turned toward him that night at parting with such a strange look of warning. But he did not always succeed in forgetting. Sometimes the remembrance of that face rose like a vision between his eyes and the endless rows of figures, and made him shudder with mingled fear and annoyance.
“It has been a lesson to me,” he would say, after awhile. “It is the only weakness I have ever been guilty of, and see how I am punished. I deserve it, and I must bear it.”
It punished him, and it told upon him. The pallor which had come upon his face the day the will was read had settled there. The old look of composed serenity and “oiliness,” as Jack called it, had gone, and in the place was a look of strained intentness, as if he were always listening, and watching, and waiting.