“Not bad, as things go. Talk about seeing life, I think we kebbies do. Why, that chap must be about cracked.”
As Chester threw his overcoat on a chair in the hall, a slight rustling on the stairs took his attention.
“Watched!” he said to himself, while turning into his consulting-room, feeling convinced that either Laura or his aunt had been listening for his return.
“They must think me mad,” he said, and after a pause, “are they right?”
He was calmer now, and his mind running in this direction, he could not help feeling there was a strange dash of insanity mingled with his actions since the night when he was called out, and that this last act of hunting through the streets for a house of whose location he was utterly ignorant seemed nearly the culminating point.
“Yes, the height of folly,” he said softly. “I must try and devise some means of finding her. Chance may help me. I can do no more now.”
He rose with the intention of going up to his bedroom, but the sun was now shining brightly, and he opened the shutters before returning to his seat to try and think out some clue which he could follow up.
The light which flooded the room seemed to brighten his intellect, and in spite of the use to which he had put the latter part of the past night, his head felt cool and clear.
“Let’s look the position fairly in the face,” he said to himself. “After all, I have done Isabel no substantial wrong; I was not a free agent. I could not return; and that course is open, to go to her and to her people, frankly explain, and make up to her by my future for the weak lapse of which I have been guilty. For what are these people to me?”
He sat back with his brow knit, feeling, though, that such a course was impossible—that he could not go and humble himself before his betrothed, and that it would be an act of base and cruel hypocrisy to resume their old relations when his heart seemed to have but one desire—to see Marion again.