‘Are you gomink in to pregfast?’ Darco trumpeted.
Paul entered and took his seat, and swallowed a cup of coffee; but he had no heart to eat.
Darco took his prodigious breakfast in cold gloom, and Paul was as sure of his bitter resentment as of his own useless regret for having wounded him. It was a trying hour for both of them.
‘I am going out now,’ said Darco, ‘ant you will pe gone before I am pack again. Shake hants.’ You are going to be very zorry before I see you again.’
Paul took the proffered hand, and was nine-tenths inclined to beg himself back again into Darco’s friendship; but he could not bring himself to speak, and in a second or two Darco was in the street, and the opportunity had gone. But Paul had his marching-orders, at least, and, calling a fly, he saw his luggage set upon it, drove to the railway-station, deposited all his belongings in the cloak-room, and then started to give Claudia his news. Claudia sent out word that he might call again in an hour, and, glancing disconsolately at the window of her sitting-room as he walked away, he saw Miss Pounceby giggling behind the curtains with her head in a bush of curlpapers. He paced the streets until the hour had gone by, and then returned.
‘What brings you here so early?’ Claudia asked.
She looked ravishingly fresh and pretty to Paul’s fancy.
‘I told Darco,’ Paul answered, ‘that I was going to London, and that I wanted to leave at the end of next week. He was hurt and angry, and he said that, if I had made up my mind about it, I had better go at once.’
‘You have behaved very foolishly, Paul,’ said Claudia—’ very foolishly indeed.’
‘I did it for your sake, Claudia.’