“Your mother’s brooch!” cried Jane. “Do you really care as much as that for him?”—a little satirically.
Her companion was dressing for the street with rapid, uncertain fingers. “It’s all I have,” she answered.
They sat in silence till they heard the outer door bolted and knew the old man below had gone to his own room. Then they stole softly down the creaking stair, undid the outer door cautiously and went out into the evening bustle.
The pavements were crowded, and Mary clung to her companion’s arm, but Jane walked nonchalantly, her dark eyes snapping with adventure. Not a few turned to gaze at her piquant beauty. To one whose way led in the same direction it brought a thought of a distant land.
“In a Suliote shawl she might be a maid of Missolonghi!” mused George Gordon, as he strode across Fleet market behind the two girls. “Greece! I wonder when I shall see it again!”
A shade of melancholy was in his face as he walked on, but not discontent. The resentment of his London home-coming and the desolation of that first black night at Newstead he had overcome. With the companionship of his sister and in the calm freshness of frosty lake and rolling wind-washed moor he had recovered some of the buoyant spirits so suddenly stunned by the impact of the slanders that had met him. The London papers he had left unopened, from a sensitive dread of seeing the recital of his mother’s well-known eccentricities, which her death might furnish excuse for recalling. His new book, whose stanzas stood like mental mile-posts of his journey, had almost finished its progress through the press. In its verses he hoped to stand for something more than the petty cavilling of personal paragraphists. It was to his publisher’s he was bound this night when that wistful thought of the shores he best loved had shadowed his mood.
Crossing the open space on which faced the dark brick front and barred windows of the Fleet Prison, he saw the two girlish forms pause before its dismal entrance, where stood the shirt-sleeved warden, pipe in mouth. What errand could have brought them there unaccompanied at such an hour, he wondered.
Just then the clock of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West began a ponderous stroke, and the warden knocked the ashes from his pipe.
“Eight o’clock,” he announced gruffly. “Prison’s closed.”
A cry of dismay fell from Mary’s lips—a cry freighted with tears. “Then we can’t get poor Bysshe!”