His sharp look was returned with interest, the two men evidently expecting him to come up the steps and address them, but he went on for a short distance in an undecided way, thinking deeply, and trying hard to see through the mental mist which shut him in. But a short time before he had felt convinced that he had found the house and been disappointed; now he felt quite as sure that the mansion where the two servants were standing must be the place. He had no special reason for coming to the conclusion, but all the same a curious feeling of attraction made him slacken his pace, angry and annoyed the while that he had not stopped and spoken to the men.
“Great heavens! What a vacillating moral coward I have grown,” he said to himself. “What would have been easier?”
He said this but felt that the task was terribly hard, for it seemed such a childish thing to do—to go about asking folk if that was the house where some people lived who had fetched him to attend a man who had been shot, and kept him a prisoner for days and days before drugging him and having him shut up in a cab to be driven about in the middle of the night.
“Why, if I could explain all this to them,” he said to himself at last, “they’d think I was a harmless kind of madman, troubled with memories of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, which I was trying to drag into everyday life like a Barber’s hundredth brother, or a one-eyed Calendar. Come, come, old fellow,” he continued, as he mentally apostrophised himself; “go back home and prescribe for yourself, and then begin to show someone that you have been suffering from a strange mental vagary, brought about by over-excitement. She will believe it in time, and all may come right again. Ah! how like.”
He started and hurried after an open carriage in which two ladies were seated. He only saw the profile of one of them very slightly, and her back as she passed, but there was a turn of the figure—a particularly graceful air, as she leaned forward to give some instruction to the coachman—which struck him as being exactly similar to attitudes he had seen Marion assume again and again when attending upon her brother.
He jumped into a cab and told the man to follow the victoria, with the result that the latter came to a standstill in front of one of the fashionable West-End drapery establishments.
Chester was close up as the lady alighted, and he sprang out excitedly to go and speak to her.
There was every opportunity, for the carriage drove on with her companion, and she crossed the pavement alone, to walk a few steps alone in front of the great plate-glass window, gazing carelessly in at the various costumes displayed.
“A woman after all,” he said to himself, bitterly annoyed at what he considered her frivolity in thinking of dress at a time when her brother was in all probability suffering still.
“But it is their nature, or the result of their education,” he said the next minute, as he went close up behind her, and saw her face reflected clearly in the long series of mirrors at the back.