Something, Edgar felt sure, was afoot. He walked home in a brown study.
Only once did he smile; and that was when he recollected Gaythorpe's curiosity. Gaythorpe, he remembered, had been curious not only about Monty, but also about the hypothetical attractive person whom it would have been a pleasure to help. Strange that he should have made so much of this point. Working, Edgar supposed, from the words "young and attractive," Gaythorpe had taken it for granted that this person was a woman—no doubt the fly-away girl who was to marry Edgar against his will. For an instant it seemed that Gaythorpe must have been hinting at some story, because in general he was not one of those arch sentimentalists who wink and curvet about the subject of marriage. Edgar gave a little laughing grunt as he walked.
"Silly old man," he thought. "I wonder what put all that nonsense into his head."
Perhaps Edgar was not quite as candid with himself as he should have been and as he generally was. He strode at a rapid pace along the ringing pavements; and the fresh wind that met him came deliciously cordial to his cheeks and lungs. Although he was not tall—about five feet eight—Edgar was sturdily built, and he loved walking. And in London the night hours are the best for that exercise. He was refreshed and invigorated. By the time he was half way down the Brompton Road Edgar had dismissed the subjects of Monty and the unknown from his mind; and thereafter all his thoughts were of business affairs until he reached home. All of them? Very nearly all. Some few, perhaps, he spared for Patricia; but he hardly was conscious when he thought of her, so familiar was he with the subject.
vi
It was not until he was indoors, and sitting rather moodily by a waning fire, that Edgar returned to some of Gaythorpe's remarks. He did this in an instinctive effort to explain the moodiness of which he felt suddenly conscious. True, he had felt moments of melancholy while abroad; but those had been explicable by the fact that he was friendless in strange cities. Now the case was different. Somewhere within his heart there was an almost bitter resentment of Gaythorpe's cynicism on the subjects of women and marriage. At the moment he had accepted them as he would normally have done. They returned with added venom to his memory. The first thought—that perhaps Gaythorpe had been unhappy in his marriage—Edgar dismissed as sentimentality. The truer explanation was probably that the old man was expressing a fundamental cynicism, due to the fact that his own happiness had left him occasion to view the miseries of others. Edgar, too, had witnessed those miseries. He was still unable to explain them except in individual cases. He was thoughtful and none too happy. There had been menace—the deeper because he had concluded it to be unconscious—in Gaythorpe's insistence on the reality of a young woman towards whom Edgar felt a helpful eagerness.
"What a fool I was to give him such an opening!" he thought.
Slowly it was as though Edgar fell asleep. He saw two clear eyes, which he thought to hold all the truth and beauty in the world. He heard spoken words—words that were almost all that Patricia had ever said to him. The sense of her presence was extraordinarily strong ... a presence that was more than presence, for Edgar was quite poignantly imagining a real Patricia, so much more beautiful than she would seem with others present. His lips moved in unspoken words. His hands were gently raised from the arms of his chair, and extended. If desire and imagination had the power to call those we love to our sides, then surely Edgar would have awakened with Patricia in his arms. He was experiencing a reality of communion which only those who love deeply can conceive. The emotion he then felt transcended anything he had ever known.