A light flashed across her face. She drew me to her and kissed my forehead.
“I am sure it would be best,” she said. “I too loathe this place! I shall never live here any more. To-morrow——”
“To-morrow,” I interrupted, “we will go away.”
CHAPTER XXVII
A GHOST IN WHITECHAPEL
Despite a certain amount of relief at leaving a neighborhood so full of horrible associations, those first few weeks in London were certainly not halcyon ones. My post was by no means a sinecure. Every morning I had thirty or forty letters to answer, besides which there was an immense amount of copying to be done. The subject matter of all this correspondence was by no means interesting to me, and the work itself, although I forced myself to accomplish it with at any rate apparent cheerfulness was tedious and irksome. Apart from all this, I found it unaccountably hard to concentrate my thoughts upon my secretarial labors. The sight of the closely written pages, given me to copy, continually faded away, and I saw in their stead Warren slopes with the faint outlines of the Court—in the distance Bruce Deville walking side by side with Olive Berdenstein, as I had seen them on the day before I had come away. She had now at any rate what she had so much desired—the man whom she loved with so absorbing a passion—all to herself, free to devote himself to her, if he had indeed the inclination, and with no other companionship at hand to distract his thoughts from her. I found myself wondering more than once whether she would ever succeed in making her bargain with him. The little news which we had was altogether indefinite. Alice did not mention either of them in her scanty letters. She was on the point of moving to Eastminster—in fact, she was already spending most of her time there. From Bruce Deville himself we had heard nothing, although my mother had written to him on the first day of our arrival in London. Once or twice she had remarked upon his silence, and I had listened to her surmises without remark.
I am afraid that as a secretary I was not a brilliant success in those first few unhappy weeks. But my mother made no complaint. I could see that it made her happy to have me with her. My silence she doubtless attributed to my anxiety concerning my father. I did my best to hide my unhappiness from her.
News of some sort came from Alice at last. She wrote from Eastminster saying that she had nearly finished the necessary preparations there, and was looking forward to my father’s return. She had heard from him that morning, she said. He was at Ventnor, and much improved in health. She was expecting him home in a week.