Now her sister had said frankly that this “luck” was due to her sister’s talents and hard work.
What did this discrepancy mean?
Gerard worried himself unceasingly about this, for he could not get the brilliant and beautiful Miss Davison out of his head. Lilian had said that her sister had a little studio somewhere near Regent Street, where she occupied herself with these wonderful designs which brought her in so handsome an income.
Mrs. Davison, she had said, lived at Brighton, and Rachel divided her time between her mother and Lady Jennings, whose address Gerard immediately set himself to discover.
It was near Sloane Street, a small house, the position of which suggested a rental quite out of proportion to its small size.
Gerard took a walk in that direction, and looked wistfully at the door at which he dared not knock. He felt himself to be growing even dangerously sentimental about this girl, and told himself he was a fool to think of a woman who certainly harbored no thought of him.
And yet—there was the rub!—it had seemed to him, that afternoon at the Academy, that Rachel looked at him with a certain expression which suggested that, so far from having forgotten him, she retained almost as vivid a remembrance of him as he did of her. This was not a fancy, it was a fact, and it completed his subjugation to the tyranny of his ideal.
He began to haunt the West End, hovering between Sloane Street and Regent Street until one evening, when there was a grand dinner-party given, and a great crowd was assembled in one of the Squares in the expectation of the arrival of royalty, he recognized, with a pang of surprise and terror which almost made him cry out aloud, the face and figure of Rachel Davison not far away from him.
She was dressed in a shabby skirt and blouse, and an old, shapeless black hat, but the disguise was ineffectual for him; he knew her at once, and was about to approach her, and to address her, when suddenly he saw her withdraw to the outskirts of the crowd, followed by a thickset man rather above the middle height. Gerard, hiding himself with a strange sickness at his heart, among the crowd, nevertheless kept watch.
And he saw her hand something bright and glistening to the man, and then disappear absolutely from sight.