The riksha joggled over a stone and he collapsed like a shut-down opera hat.
Leslie continued his way.
CHAPTER XXXI
FAREWELL
It was seven o’clock; the birds were taking their nests in the cherry orchard with one final burst of chattering. The sky in the west, wave-green melting into vaguest blue, held one solitary cloud floating like a rose-leaf beneath the evening star. Leslie stood at his gate, looking for the last time at the twilight stealing over Nagasaki. He had just arrived.
M’Gourley’s words were still ringing in his ears, and his mind was in a turmoil.
He was in exactly the position of the man who has cheated unwittingly at cards, who has found out his mistake, and who has still time to save his honor.
If the Bombay and Benares bank was safe, it was his plain duty to go at once to Jane du Telle and inform her of the fact. She was laboring under the impression that he was a ruined man. Half of her sympathy, the whole of the present situation, had arisen from that misconception. To leave her under this delusion would amount to fraud—the meanest of all frauds.