“Thank you, but it is so dreadfully out of your way. I should be very glad if you would, only it is troubling you so much.”
Something in her eager yet half-shy welcome, and in the sense that she was one of the very few who really believed in him, filled Frithiof with a happiness which he could scarcely have explained to himself.
“You will be giving me a very great pleasure,” he said. “I expect there will be a rush on the trains. Shall we try for a cab?”
So they walked out together into the dense fog, Cecil with a blissful sense of confidence in the man who piloted her so adroitly through the crowd, and seemed so astonishingly cool and indifferent amid the perilous confusion of wheels and hoofs, which always appeared in the quarter where one least expected them.
At last, after much difficulty, Frithiof secured a hansom, and put her into it. She was secretly relieved that he got in too.
“I will come back with you if you will allow me,” he said; “for I am not quite sure whether this is not a more dangerous part of the adventure than when we were on foot. I never saw such a fog! Why, we can’t even see the horse, much less where he is going.”
“How thankful I am that you were here! It would have been dreadful all alone,” said Cecil; and she explained to him how Mrs. Horner had failed her at the last moment.
He made no comment, but in his heart he was glad that both Mrs. Horner and Roy should have proved faithless, and that the duty of seeing Cecil home had devolved upon him.
“You have not met my mother since she came back from the sea,” said Cecil. “Are you still afraid of infection? The house has been thoroughly painted and fumigated.”
“Oh, it is not that,” said Frithiof “but while this cloud is still over me, I can’t come. You do not realize how it affects everything.”