'I'm glad to hear you say so—very glad. Just stick to that. You're more civilised than I am, and you'll know how to go about that kind of thing as a man should.'
'I mean to try.'
'She is not seriously ill, I hope?' Hugh inquired, after reflecting for a moment.
'Oh, the nerves—breakdown—nothing dangerous, I believe.'
'Life ought to be easy enough for you, Rolfe,' said the other. 'You're at home here.'
'It depends what you mean by "here". I'm at home in England, no doubt; but it's very uncertain whether I shall hold out in London. You know that we're going west to Gunnersbury. That's on the child's account; I want him to go to school with a friend of ours. If we can live there quietly and sanely, well and good; if the whirlpool begins to drag us in again—then I have another idea.'
'The whirlpool!' muttered Carnaby, with a broken laugh. 'It's got hold of me, and I'm going down, old man—and it looks black as hell.'
'We shall see the sunlight again together,' replied Rolfe, with forced cheerfulness.
'You think so? I wish I could believe it.'
In less than half an hour Harvey was back at the station, waiting for his train. He suffered pangs of self-rebuke; it seemed to him that he ought to have found some better way, in word or deed, for manifesting the sympathy of true friendship. He had betrayed a doubt which must for ever affect Hugh's feeling towards him. But this was his lot in life, to blunder amid trying circumstances, to prove unequal to every grave call upon him. He tried vainly to see what else he could have done, yet felt that another man would have faced the situation to better purpose. One resolve, at all events, he had brought out of it: Hugh Carnaby's reference to Alma declared the common-sense view of a difficulty which ought to be no difficulty at all, and put an end to vacillation. But in return for this friendly service he had rendered nothing, save a few half-hearted words of encouragement. Rolfe saw himself in a mean, dispiriting light.