She raised her weary eyes, and looked at him mildly.
'I no longer love you,' she said. 'I cannot remember what love means. You do not understand--no man could understand, I suppose; I don't blame you--the tremendous meaning of what has befallen me. All is changed; the whole of the past is lost and dead to me. Don't mistake me,' she went on earnestly. 'If I did love you, I think I should be too wise to accept your offer. But it is over for ever. And now I must beg you to leave me; I am expecting my lawyer, to tell me the news which you have forestalled him in, and--'
A knock at the street-door interrupted her.
'No doubt this is Mr. Patten. Pray leave me.'
Gustave de Tournefort went close up to her, and spoke low and rapidly, 'I will leave you. But on the day when the decree is made absolute, you shall receive the same offer from me.'
Without another word, without any farewell from her, he left the room, and--having passed Mr. Patten on the stairs--the house.
[CHAPTER XII.]
AN ODD FRIENDSHIP.
It was not in a spirit of idle curiosity that Sir Nugent Uffington induced May Forestfield to talk to him on the events of her past life, and to accustom herself to talk to him without the slightest reserve as to her hopes and fears. That he was deeply interested in her he had long since allowed to himself; but dreamer and idler as he had been throughout his life, he began to feel that all this interest was of no avail unless he could turn it to practical use. How that was to be done, how he could render any assistance to a woman in such a forlorn situation, he could not for a long time divine; and when after giving himself up to much solitude and the smoking of innumerable pipes, he at length hit upon what he considered was best to be done, he had to confess to himself with much shame that he had not yet discovered the way to do it.
For the carrying out of his project it was not merely necessary that he should make Lord Forestfield's acquaintance, but that he should cultivate a certain amount of intimacy with that distinguished nobleman; and when Uffington had got over what seemed to him the superhuman task of forcing himself to consent to such an intimacy, he had still to encounter the practical difficulty of finding out where Lord Forestfield was. The only thing to be learned with any certainty about him was that he was not in London, having quitted town the day the decree nisi was pronounced; but neither at his clubs nor from the columns of those courtly journals in which the movements of distinguished personages are usually announced could Uffington learn anything of his whereabouts.