'Bosh!' said Caffyn, using that modern form for polite repudiation of gratitude—'no trouble at all; looks rather as if I wanted to get rid of you, don't you know—Gilroy's going out so very soon.'
'Is he?' said Vincent. He had no suspicions; Mabel's engagement seemed only too probable, and he knew that he had never had any claim upon her; but for all that, he had no intention of taking the fact entirely upon trust; he would not leave England till he had seen her and learned from her own lips that he must give up hope for ever; after that the sooner he went the better.
'You needn't go out with him unless you want to—you might join him later there; but of course you wouldn't take anything for granted, nothing. Still, if you did care to go out at once, I suppose you've nothing in the way of preparations to hinder you, eh?'
'No,' said Vincent; 'it would only be transferring my trunks from one ship to another; but I—I don't feel well enough to go out just yet.'
'Of course not,' said Caffyn; 'you must have a week or two of mountain air first, then you'll be ready to go anywhere; but I must have you at Wastwater,' he added, with a laughing look of intelligence at Mark, whose soul rose against all this duplicity—and subsided again.
How wonderfully everything was working out! Unless some fatality interposed between then and the next morning, the man he dreaded would be safely buried in the wildest part of the Lake District—he might even go off to India again and never learn the wrong he had suffered! At all events, Mark was saved for a time. He was thankful, deeply thankful now that he had resisted that mad impulse to confession.
Vincent had dropped into an arm-chair with his back to the window, brooding over his shattered ambitions; all his proud self-confidence in his ability to win fame for the woman he loved was gone now; he felt that he had neither the strength nor the motive to try again. If—if this he had heard was true, he must be an exile, with lower aims and a blanker life than those he had once hoped for.
All at once Mark, as he stood at the window with Caffyn, stepped back with a look of helpless terror.
'What the deuce is it now?' said the other under his breath.
Mark caught Caffyn's elbow with a fierce grip; a carriage had driven up; they could see it plainly still in the afternoon light, which had only just begun to fade.