'Let me see, what was it?' he said. 'Ah, I remember; your love, and you will if you can, eh?'
'Yes, and say I've had a letter from him this morning,' she added.
He gave a strange laugh, and then, as he turned, she saw how ghastly and drawn his face looked.
'Have you though?' he said wildly; 'so have I, Trixie, so have I!' And before she could ask any further questions he was gone.
He walked blindly up the little street and into the main road again, unable at first to think with any clearness: he had not read the letter; the stamp and handwriting on the envelope were enough for him. The bolt had fallen from a clear sky, the thing he had only thought of as a nightmare had really happened—the sea had given up its dead! He went on; there was the same old woman in the sun-bonnet, still crooning the same song; he laughed bitterly to think of the difference in his own life since he had last seen her—only a short half-hour ago. He passed the parish church, from which a wedding party was just driving, while the bells clashed merrily under the graceful spire—no wedding bells would ever clash for him now. But he must read that letter and know the worst. Holroyd was alive—that he knew; but had he found him out? did that envelope contain bitter denunciations of his treachery? Perhaps he had already exposed him! he could not rest until he knew how this might be, and yet he dared not read his letter in the street. He thought he would find out a quiet spot in Kensington Gardens and read it there; alone—quite alone. He hurried on, with a dull irritation that the High Street should be so long and so crowded, and that everybody should make such a point of getting in the way; the shock had affected his body as well as his mind; he was cold to the bones, and felt a dull numbing pressure on the top of his head; and yet he welcomed these symptoms, too, with an odd satisfaction; they seemed to entitle him to some sympathy. He reached the Gardens at last, but when he had turned in at the little postern door near the 'King's Arms,' he could not prevail upon himself to open the letter—he tore it half open and put it back irresolutely; he must find a seat and sit down. He struck up the hill, with the wind in his teeth now, until he came to the Round Pond, where there was quite a miniature sea breaking on the southwestern rim of the basin; a small boy was watching a solitary ship labouring far out in the centre, and Mark stood and watched it too, mechanically, till he turned away at last with a nervous start of impatience. Once he had sailed ships on those waters; what would he not give if those days could come back to him again, or if even he could go back these past few months to the time when his conscience was clear and he feared no man! But the past was irrevocable; he had been guilty of this reckless, foolish fraud, and now the consequences were upon him! He walked restlessly on under the bare tossing branches, looking through the black trunks and across the paths glimmering white in the blue-grey distance for a seat where he might be safe from interruption, until at last he discovered a clumsy wooden bench, scored and slashed with the sand-ingrained initials of a quarter of a century's idleness, a seat of the old uncomfortable pattern gradually dying out from the walks. He could wait no longer, and was hurrying forward to secure it, when he was hailed by some one approaching by one of the Bayswater paths, and found that he had been recognised by Harold Caffyn.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
MARK KNOWS THE WORST.
TO avoid Caffyn was out of the question, and so Mark waited for him with as much self-control as he could muster, as he strolled leisurely up. Caffyn's quick eye saw at once that something unusual had happened, and he resolved to find out what that was before they parted. 'Thought it must be you,' he began; 'so you've come out here to meditate on your coming happiness, have you? Come along and pour out some of your raptures, it will do you good; and you don't know what a listener I can be.'
'Not now,' said Mark uneasily; 'I—I think I would rather be alone.'