Duncombe bowed his head to fate.
"Very well!" he said. "I will go!"
CHAPTER XIII
"HER VOICE."
"You have heard now," Duncombe said, finally, "the whole history of my wanderings. I feel like a man who has been beating the air, who has been at war with unseen and irresistible forces. I never seemed to have a chance. In plain words, I have failed utterly!"
The two men were sitting in a room impossible of classification. It might have been a study, smoking-room, or gun-room. The walls were adorned with stags' heads and various trophies of the chase. There were guns and rifles in plenty in a rack by the chimney-piece, a row of bookcases along the north wall, golf clubs, cricket bats, and foils everywhere. A pile of logs ready for burning stood in the open grate, and magnificent rugs were spread about the floor. Nowhere was there the slightest trace of a woman's presence, for Duncombe had no sisters, and his was entirely a bachelor household.
Duncombe himself and Andrew Pelham were seated in great easy-chairs in front of the open window. It was his first fine evening at home, and he was drinking in great draughts of the fresh pure air, fragrant with the perfume of roses and huge clusters of wallflowers. Paris had seemed to him like a great oven. All the time he had been half stifled, and yet he knew very well that at a word from Spencer he would have returned there at an hour's notice. He knew, too, that the home which he had loved all his days could never be quite the same place to him again.
Andrew roused himself from rather a prolonged silence.