"And—and yet you spoke of—hinted at—some possible reward?" she said, wondering whether she should offer him money.
"Are you dying to make me a present of, say, a thousand pounds?" he said, laughing softly. "I am sorry to balk your generous intentions, but I do not want money—at present. I am not rich, excepting in the sense that the man whose requirements are small is never poor. No, I do not want your money, Violet. Some day I may—I only say I may—come to you and remind you of my share in this little business. Perhaps I may never do so; but at any rate, your bare 'I thank you' will reward me sufficiently now."
"Then, I thank you!" she said.
He pressed her hand, looked into her eyes with the same half-comical smile, and then left her.
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
Blair came back to town, thin, and pale, and haggard, with only one desire in his heart: to forget the past and kill the present! He had been wild and reckless as a youth, and it had only been his love for Margaret that had checked him in his road to ruin.
If she had still been by his side, he would have swung round and become one of the steadiest of men—she would have been his saving and guardian angel. But he had lost her, and with her all that had made his life worth living.
So he came back to the old life in London, hating it with a weariness bitter as death, and yet not knowing of any other way in which to kill time and escape from the past.
As Austin Ambrose had said, his friends were glad to see him, but they were aghast at the change which a few weeks had wrought in the old light-hearted Blair; and the pace he was going alarmed even the most reckless of them.