He walked back again at once to Park Lane, still thinking intently, still wondering if he could have done better in any way. Honest all through, he hated with a physical repulsion the thought of what he felt sure Jim had done, but oddly enough, instead of feeling a crescendo of dislike to Jim himself, he was conscious only of a puzzled sort of pity. By instinct he separated the deed from the doer, instead of bracketting them both in one clause of disgusted condemnation. And then he ceased to wonder at that: it seemed natural, after all.
He went straight up to Dora’s room, and found her still at her table with letters round her. But when he entered she was not writing: she was staring out of the window with a sort of terror on her face. Claude guessed what it was that perhaps had put it there, and what lurked behind that look of agonized appeal that she turned on him.
“I’m sorry for being so long, dear,” he said, “but I’ve been making a fool of myself. That cheque I spoke to you about is quite all right. I found the counterfoil in my old book at the flat. I drew it right enough. Mr. Humby expects a fellow to carry in his head the memory of every half-crown he spends.”
Dora gave one great sobbing sigh of relief, which she could not check.
“I’m glad,” she said. “I hated to think that Parker perhaps had gone wrong. One—one hates suspicion, and its atmosphere.”
Claude heard, could not help hearing the relief in the voice, could not help seeing that the smile she gave him struggled like mist-ridden sunlight to shine through his dispelled clouds of nameless apprehension. Nor could his secret mind avoid guessing what that apprehension was, for it was no stranger to him; he had been sharer in it till he had seen Jim, when it deepened into a certainty which was the opposite to that which at this moment brought such relief to his wife. The other certainty, his own, must of course be kept sealed and locked from her, and Claude hastened to convey it away from her presence, so to speak, by talking of something else, for fear that it might, in despite of him, betray some hint of its existence.
“But there was something you wanted to speak to me about,” he said.
“Yes. It is about your mother. Do you think she is well?”
“No, I haven’t thought so for the last three or four days,” said he. “What have you noticed?”
“I went into her room just now,” said Dora, “and she was sitting and doing nothing. And she was crying.”