“Poor, passionate, weak girl!” he said to himself again and again, as he journeyed on, and his heart was full of sympathy for her and indignation against his brother, whom he connected with the trouble, whatever it might be.
“Sick unto death,” he muttered. “Heartbroken and despairing after finding him out. Oh, how can a man be so base?”
Then all kinds of projects had flashed across his mind as to what might be done. Janet would certainly separate sooner or later from Jessop, and when she did, as the Doctor had intimated, she would return to her old home, and then why should not Dinah help him to soften her hard lot?
“No,” he said, directly after. “It would be madness—impossible. Janet’s is not the nature to assimilate with Dinah’s. I am not so weak and blind to all her faults as I was then. Poor girl! Poor girl! Her life wrecked, and by my own brother too.”
At last!
The cab drew up at the great blank-looking door of the Doctor’s house, and Clive leaped out, paid the man, and hurried up the broad steps in the cold, grey morning. How many times, full of expectation and delight, he had hurried to that door bearing presents or bouquets; and now he was there once more—to hear what news of the bright, handsome girl whom he had made his idol from a boy?
His hand was upon the heavy knocker, but it dropped to his side, and he rang the night-bell, and then stood listening to the distant wheels of the cab in which he had come.
“Who is it?” came in a husky whisper from the mouth of the speaking-tube, and he answered back—
“I: Clive Reed.”
“Down directly.”