As she spoke she opened the door of a sitting-room on the ground-floor, a room furnished in the depressing fashion peculiar to London lodgings. Something in the untidy and neglected air of it, in the odour of stale spirits and tobacco, and the quantity of newspapers strewn around, took Laline's thoughts back instantly to the old Boulogne life with her father. There was plenty of time yet, and her head throbbed with a dull incessant pain. She therefore accepted the landlady's offer of tea and sat down in a shiny black horsehair arm-chair, with her eyes fixed on the clock, to wait for her husband.
The minutes ticked by. Tea was brought in. Laline drank it and dismissed the sympathetic but inquisitive landlady, who opined that "gentlemen do get detained like when they meet a friend in the Strand—especially gentlemen that are going abroad. It's 'Good luck to you!' and a glass here and a glass there, until many a gentleman doesn't rightly know the time of day or whether he's on his head or his heels."
Still the minutes ticked by. The half-hour struck, the quarter, and finally the hour. The train which was to take them on the first stage of their journey towards that new life in the West had left the station by this time, Laline knew. Motionless she sat, watching the hands of the clock, while the cab waited outside with her luggage, until the full pain and humiliation of her position suddenly burst upon her with overwhelming force.
Wallace was spending the day drinking, and had probably forgotten all about the appointment. The landlady outside, peeping curiously at her every now and then through the chink in the folding-doors leading to the adjoining room, knew it, and pitied her. She could not go back to Mrs. Vandeleur's—she had burned her ships. By this time every one believed that she and her husband had left London. This was the beginning of the ordeal she must go through, and, coming after a long period of intense strain and suffering, it seemed more than Laline could bear.
Suddenly slipping on her knees before the chair on which she had been sitting, she stretched up her arms in a despairing prayer to Heaven.
"Help me! Help me! I cannot bear it! My heart will break!"
She did not hear the folding-doors open; she did not see the shambling figure standing in the aperture with haggard eyes fixed upon her. She never guessed that Wallace had come home after a day spent in wild excess, and that, hearing of her presence, he had crept first into the bedroom and endeavoured, by plunging his head in cold water, to make himself presentable to his wife. He had forgotten the time fixed for the train, but he retained an uneasy sense of a last chance lost. The cold water partly sobered him, but right through his dull blurred senses Laline's heart-breaking cry pierced to his very soul.
He had spoiled his own life, and no new one was possible. He knew in his secret heart that he should go on in the old way again and drag her life down in the misery of his. She had come to him to save him, and already her heart was breaking. Lorin, too, who had been his friend through everything, was breaking his heart away from his home and his love. He turned back into the room and looked at himself in a strip of glass affixed to the wardrobe. Gray-haired, pallid, with shaking hands and bloodshot eyes, was he worth the sacrifice this girl was making for him?
Every nerve in his body thundered "No!" And, moved by the first unselfish impulse of his life, he crept out into the darkness and slippery rain of the thaw outside.
"'Found drowned,' that's what they'll call it. And she need never know."