Stung by this retort, the other turned and aimed a blow at Butler's face; but he stopped it cleverly, and then, seizing him by the shoulder, he swung him violently round, and threw him within the gate of the garden.
“You are more angered than hurt,” muttered Tony, as he looked at him for an instant.
“Oh, Tony, that this could be you!” cried a faint voice from a little window of an attic, and a violent sob closed the words.
Tony turned and went his way towards London, those accents ringing in his ears, and at every step he went repeating, “That this could be you!”
CHAPTER XV. A STRANGE MEETING AND PARTING
What a dreary waking was that of Tony's on the morning after the orgies! Not a whit the less overwhelming from the great difficulty he had in recalling the events, and investigating his own share in them. There was nothing that he could look back upon with pleasure. Of the dinner and the guests, all that he could remember was the costliness and the tumult; and of the scene at Mrs. M'Grader's, his impression was of insults given and received, a violent altercation, in which his own share could not be defended.
How different had been his waking thoughts, had he gone as he proposed, to bid Dora a good-bye, and tell her of his great good fortune! How full would his memory now have been of her kind words and wishes; how much would he have to recall of her sisterly affection, for they had been like brother and sister from their childhood! It was to Dora that Tony confided all his boyhood's sorrows, and to the same ear he had told his first talc of love, when the beautiful Alice Lyle had sent through his heart those emotions which, whether of ecstasy or torture, make a new existence and a new being to him who feels them for the first time. He had loved Alice as a girl, and was all but heart-broken when she married. His sorrows—and were they not sorrows?—had all been intrusted to Dora; and from her he had heard such wise and kind counsels, such encouraging and hopeful words; and when the beautiful Alice came back, within a year, a widow, far more lovely than ever, he remembered how all bis love was rekindled. Nor was it the less entrancing that it was mingled with a degree of deference for her station, and an amount of distance which her new position exacted.
He had intended to have passed his last evening with Dora in talking over these things; and how had he spent it? In a wild and disgraceful debauch, and in a company of which he felt himself well ashamed.
It was, however, no part of Tony's nature to spend time in vain regrets; he lived ever more in the present than the past. There were a number of things to be done, and done at once. The first was to acquit his debt for that unlucky dinner; and, in a tremor of doubt, he opened his little store to see what remained to him. Of the eleven pounds ten shillings his mother gave him he had spent less than two pounds; he had travelled third-class to London, and while in town denied himself every extravagance. He rang for his hotel bill, and was shocked to see that it came to three pounds seven-and-sixpence. He fancied he had half-starved himself, and he saw a catalogue of steaks and luncheons to his share that smacked of very gluttony. He paid it without a word, gave an apology to the waiter that he had run himself short of money, and could only offer him a crown. The dignified official accepted the excuse and the coin with a smile of bland sorrow. It was a pity that cut both ways,—for himself and for Tony too.