The man reined in his horse with an inquiring glance at the hooded figure on the pavement, seeking a fare. And it was without hesitation that she engaged him, giving him the number of Oswyn's house in Frith Street, Soho, in her calm, well-bred voice, and bidding him be quick.
But the horse was incapable—tired, perhaps (she recalled the fact long afterwards, and the very shape and colour of the bony, ill-groomed animal, as one remembers trivial details upon occasions of great import); and after a while she resigned herself to a tedious drive.
As they rattled along confusedly through the crowded streets she caught from time to time the reflection of her own face in the two little mirrors at each side, and wondered to find herself the same. For she did not deceive herself, nor undervalue the crushing force of the blow which she had received.
To her husband, when she turned scornfully from his clumsy evasions—for a moment, perhaps, to herself—she had justified the singular course she was taking by an overwhelming necessity of immediately facing the truth, in which, perhaps, there still lurked the dim possibility of explanation whereby her husband's vileness might find the shadow of an excuse.
But with further reflection—and she was reflecting with passionate intensity—this little glow-worm of hope expired. The truth! She knew it already—had known before, almost instinctively—that Philip Rainham's justification could only be the warrant of her husband's guilt; no corroboration of Oswyn's could make that dreary fact any plainer than it was already.
No, it was hardly the truth which she desired so much as an act of tardy expiation which she would make. For with the bitterness of her conviction that, for all her wealth, and her beauty, and her youth, she had, none the less, irretrievably thrown away her life, there mingled an immense contrition at having been so blind and hard, so culpably unjust to the most generous of men, who had deliberately effaced himself for her good.
And the exceeding bitterness of her self-reproach, which alone saved her composure, forbidding the mockery of tears, was only exaggerated when she remembered how vain her remorse must remain. It mattered no jot that she was sorry, since death had sealed their estrangement ironically for all time.
In her passionate recognition of his constant justice and kindness, which of old, vainly striving to perpetuate the fading illusion of her husband's honour (her generosity did not pause to remember how vain these efforts had been), she had discounted for hypocrisy, she felt that no price of personal suffering would have been too heavy if only for one hour, one moment, she could have recalled him from the world of shadows to her side.
She could figure to herself, refining on her misery, his attitude in such a case: the half sad, half jesting reassurance of his gravely pardoning eyes.
They haunted her just then, those eyes of Philip Rainham, which had been to the last so ambiguous and so sad, and were now perpetually closed.