Chris Lisle went straight back to his lodgings, for the glorious night and the glittering sea had no attraction for him now. His landlady looked at him pityingly, and longed to ask him whether he was better, but did not dare.
“Poor young man,” she said to herself, as she heard him go up to bed early; “a good night’s rest is better than balm.”
She was quite right; but Chris Lisle had neither rest nor balm, but lay in his bed all night wakeful, seeing a pale, despicable looking man discovered like a thief in the Fort garden after he had waded the moat and climbed the wall.
“I shall have to meet Gartram and face him, and listen to his sneers and insolent bullying reproaches. Oh, how could I be such a fool?”
Chris Lisle lay awake all night working up his defence, the more strongly that he felt that he now stood more upon an equality with Claude’s father; but the slip he had made troubled him sorely.
“There’s only one way out of the difficulty,” he said at last, as the sun shone brightly in through his window. “Go up to him, confess what one has done, and boldly and frankly ask him once more to give me a chance.”
There was something so refreshing in that thought, backed as it was by forty thousand pounds, that Chris Lisle turned over and went to sleep.
But it might have been because he was utterly tired out.