Then he wrote a fresh note. It was to the effect that he would be in town at a certain time on the morrow and Preene was to meet him.
He signed it with his old initials, E. M., and, having directed it in a running hand utterly unlike his own, he went out and posted it in the village himself.
He felt inexpressibly mean and guilty and miserable. As he walked home he fell into one of his fits of depression. He anticipated the worst. There was an end to his fool’s paradise at last. On the morrow he would have to be scheming, and might, for all he knew, be drawn into the old vortex again. His only safety from the past might lie in a fresh crime.
Gertie was standing in the garden near the front entrance as he came up the path. She noticed his black look and shrank aside. He went straight through the house and shut himself in his study. He was busy all the morning with some papers which he took from a drawer that he always kept locked.
Ruth saw nothing of him till evening, when they sat down to dinner. Gertie had told her that he had one of his ‘fits’ on him, and Ruth, like a sensible little woman, thought discretion was the better part of valour, and did not go and worry him.
At dinner he scarcely spoke, and Ruth and Gertie had the conversation to themselves. When the servants were out of the room, Ruth, thinking to coax him out of his silence, laughingly offered him a penny for his thoughts, and, when he did not reply, raised her offer to twopence, and put the two coppers in front of him on the table.
He pushed them angrily away, and in doing so his hand caught the wine-glass and dashed the contents all over the table-cloth.
‘Oh, Edward, how careless!’ exclaimed Ruth. ‘Why, what-ever’s put you out?’
‘Nothing!’ he answered snappishly.
‘Nonsense! something has. Come, tell me. Why have secret from me? Was it anything in the letters this morning?’