It was arranged that Petrovitch should seek out John Hatfield and his wife, and should let them know that their daughter was happily married. They judged it best not to subject Alice to an interview which could not but involve most painful explanations, and they agreed that it would be cruel both to her and to her parents to let them meet, merely to part again at once. Of Clare Stanley neither of them spoke one word.
A new day was some way into its small hours when they said good-bye.
'We meet in St Petersburg, then, as soon as may be,' Petrovitch said. 'I shall not see you again till then.'
'I hope by that time I shall have done something to prove to you that you have indeed brought me back to the ranks of duty and the Revolution.'
'I don't need proof,' said the other with one last hand-pressure. And so they parted.
Next morning early, Litvinoff went down into the City, where he paid a disproportionate sum of money for a paper which empowered him to marry his wife at once, instead of waiting three weeks for that privilege. Then he went down to Chislehurst. The sky was clear and pale and blue, and the sun shone divinely. The trees that had been brown seemed at a little distance to be wrapped in a grey gauze veil, as they always do when the green buds first break out to new life.
As Litvinoff walked up the hill to Chislehurst Common, he tried to think what he should say to Alice, how she would look, how she would speak to him. With a touch of ingrained cynicism, he laughed at himself to find that his heart was beating tumultuously, and that his hands were trembling.
'And this is the man,' he said contemptuously to himself, 'who walked behind her for half-an-hour last autumn, and never spoke to her! No, not the same man,' he added, after a pause, 'I am purged of a crime since then.'
The house where he was to seek Alice was a little yellow-brick building near the church.
He looked at the pretty old-fashioned churchyard as he passed, and then at the building itself.