“What can I do, sir?” cried Huish. “That is why I ask your help and counsel.”
“Bah!” said the voice contemptuously. “You are young and strong; you have your wits; Gertrude loves you, and you ask me for help and counsel! John Huish, at your age, under such circumstances, it would have been a bold man who would have robbed me of my prize. There, go—go, young man, and think and act. Poor Gertrude! she has a mother who makes Mammon her God—a woman who has broken one of her children’s hearts; do not let her break that of the other. Go now, I am weary: this has been a tiring day. You can come to me again.”
“Do not let her break that of the other,” said John Huish to himself as the panel slowly closed; and from that moment the dim twilight of the shuttered house became to him glorious with light, and he went away feeling joyous and elastic as he had not felt for days. As he neared his chambers a thin, grey, hard-faced-looking woman, who had stood watching for quite an hour, stepped out of a doorway and touched him on the arm.
He turned sharply, and she said in a low voice:
“I must see you. Come to-morrow night at the old time.”
Before he could speak she had hurried away, turned down the next street, and was gone.
“To-morrow night—the old time?” said Huish, gazing after her, and then raising his hat to place his hand upon his forehead. “Quite cool. Is it fancy? Why should that woman speak to me?”
Then, turning upon his heel, he entered the door of his chambers, and set himself to work to think over his interview, and to devise some plan for defeating Lady Millet in her projected enterprise.
“It would shock her,” he said at last; “but when she knows of her uncle’s views she might be influenced. She must, she shall be. The poor old man’s words have given me strength, and I shall win, after all. But what slaves we are to custom and prejudice! I ought not to be the man to study them in such a case as this.”
Then the words just spoken to him at the door came back to puzzle and set him thinking of several other encounters—or fancied encounters with people whom he felt that he had never seen before.