His last word was inaudible, as he hurried towards the door, where Mrs Hallam was awaiting him.
“Go back to your grandmother, Julie,” she said, in a low, stern voice. “Christie Bayle, I wish to speak to you.”
“To me? To-night?” he said hastily. “No: to-morrow. I am not myself now, and you need rest.”
“No,” she said, in the same deep voice; “to-night,” and she led the way into an inner room.
Julia made as if to follow, but stopped short, and stood watching till her mother and their old friend disappeared.
The room was lit only by the light that streamed in from the street lamp and a shop near the hotel, so that the faces of Millicent Hallam and Bayle were half in shadow as they stood opposite to each other.
Bayle was silent, for he had seen that Mrs Hallam was deeply moved. He had studied her face too many years not to be able to read its various changes; and now, on the eve of her departure, he knew that in spite of the apparent calmness of the surface a terrible storm of grief must be raging beneath, and feeling that perhaps she wished to say a few words of thanks to him, and while asking some attention towards the old people, she was about to take this opportunity to bid him farewell, he stood there in silence waiting for her to speak.
Twice over she essayed, but the words would not come. It was as if misery, indignation, and humiliation were contending in her breast, and each mood was uppermost when she opened her lips. How could she have been so unworldly—so blind all these years, as not to have seen that Christie Bayle had been impoverishing himself that she and her child might live?
As she thought this, she was moved to humility, and admiration of the gentleman who had hidden all this from them, always behaving with the greatest delicacy, and carefully hiding the part he had taken in her life.
“And I thought myself so experienced—so well taught by adversity,” she said to herself.