Harriet acquiesced, and changed the subject to their new residence, a furnished house in May-fair. She would go there on the morrow, she said, and arrange all their little property. Had everything been removed from South Molton-street?
Everything. Routh had seen to it himself, and had employed the boy who was always about there.
"Ay," said Harriet, dreamily, for she was thinking of the time, gone for ever, when she had been happy in the home she had left without one regret or hope. "What of him?"
"Nothing that I can make out," answered Routh, irritably. "But I hate the sort of half-recollection I seem to have of him. There's something in my mind connected with him, and I can't disentangle it."
Harriet looked up at her husband in some surprise, and turned very pale. She had a painful, an indelible remembrance connected with the first time she had seen Jim Swain. But Routh knew nothing of that; so she said nothing; she made no effort to aid his memory. She would avoid the torture when she could. Besides, she was utterly weary in body and in spirits.
Mr. Carruthers's letter reached George Dallas not exactly duly, indeed, but after a delay which would have astonished and exasperated the writer, had he known it, to the last degree.
Stewart Routh and Harriet were very much superior to George Dallas in many mental attributes, and in particular in cunning; but they were incapable of understanding the young man on certain points. One of these points was his love for his mother, with its concomitants of remorse, repentance, and resolution. Not comprehending this mixed feeling, they made a serious miscalculation. The day or two which Harriet allowed to intervene before she wrote the letter which was to prolong George's absence, exactly sufficed to bring him to England.
[CHAPTER XIX]
CLEARED UP.
The shock communicated to George Dallas by his stepfather's letter was violent and terrible in proportion to the resolutions which had been growing up in his mind, and gaining strength and fixedness with each day's absence from the old accustomed scenes of dissipation and sources of temptation. Like all persons of similar temperament, he was easily overcome by agitation, and his eager nature led him to anticipate evil as readily as it caused him to enjoy good thoroughly. He was a strong man physically, but a sickening, weak shudder, such as might have shaken a woman, shook him as he read the few formal lines which conveyed to him so much more than their writer had known or intended. Was it all to be in vain? Was the golden time, the precious opportunity, gone by for ever? Was she to die, or die to him at least, and never to know that his repentance had been real, that the lesson had been effectual, that the reform had been inaugurated?