But as time went on he was obliged to realise the truth, and he wrote reproachful letters, but only tore them up again, to write others in his old, simple, confiding strain.
He longed to go down and see her more often, but kept putting it off till she should express a wish for him to come, hinting at it, and expecting that some such invitation would be contained in the next letter; but he hoped against hope.
Then a week passed without any communication from Lawford, and Luke packed up a few things in a bag, and started for his old home, but only to return directly to his chambers.
“She is not ill,” he said to himself. “If she had been some one would have written to tell me. I’ll wait.”
He waited, and at the appointed time—at the end of another week—a letter came, very similar to the last, and in which she said that she would have written as usual, only that she was very busy.
“Very busy,” said Luke to himself, as he sat in his dingy room, gazing straight before him, through the dull window, at the smoky chimney-pots, but seeing, as in a picture, the interior of Lawford Girls’ School, with its mistress moving from class to class. “Very busy.”
He sighed deeply, and went on with his reading.
From that time Sage’s letters came fortnightly, Luke sending two for one, but he made no complaint, keeping rigidly to his old stern determination.
“I said I would place myself in a worthy position to win her,” he said. “That I will do. What is more, I will be faithful, come what may—faithful, even in my belief in her.”
He sat, hot of eye and weary of brain, thinking whether he ought not to go down and see why this gradual change was taking place, but in his stern repression of self he felt that to go down unexpectedly would be like mistrusting the woman he hoped to make his wife, and this he could not bear.