No sting? Jack extracted something very like one from the innocent words. Was this man going to make love to Phillis? He read the letter over and over again, each time with increasing dissatisfaction. Yet what was it to him? Were they not separated? Did he even love her? He was not sure. He only hated Mr Penington, and indulged in some expression of his feelings.
Altogether it was an odd sort of Christmas Day which followed. He had a strange unreasonable impression as if he were shut out of the homes which were his by right; thoroughly unreasonable when it came to be sifted, since it was very certain that there was not one at which he would not have been welcome. Perhaps he nursed this notion, to account for the cloud which seemed to have grown up since he read his Roman letter with all Miss Cartwright’s kind messages, but the impression of banishment and disgrace ever after haunted his remembrance of the day.
In the afternoon he took Clive to the lodgings of the man who had absconded, asking some questions by the way; the lad seldom opening his heart sufficiently to speak without being questioned. Yet every now and then Jack caught a glimpse which showed him he was not ungrateful.
“Was Smith a steady fellow?” he asked. “Did he seem in want of money?”
“Oh, he wanted money, of course. Most of my friends do,” said Clive with a laugh. “But he was steady enough. The last man in the world I should have expected to serve me so. This is the street.”
“Well, keep well out of sight,” directed Jack. “We’ll see if I can’t make an impression on the landlady.”
He found her voluble over her wrongs—“To have gone off quite unexpected without by your leave or with your leave, and not a word of notice, nor to have heard nothing from that day to this, and the rent owing, and—”
“It seems strange to me that he did not take his things,” hazarded Jack.
The woman gave him a quick glance.
“Things! There was little enough he had. He took his carpet bag, and in that there was everything he had of value, that you may be sure of, and me such a loser and quite unsuspecting; and as for the bits he left behind, well, sir, if you wish for an inventory, there’s a bootjack and a clothes-brush, and—”