Mosscrop kicked it violently again and again where it lay.
CHAPTER VIL
Mosscrop had not the heart to breakfast alone in his deserted lodgings.
The impulse to get away mastered him on the instant of its appearance. He strode forth as if delay were fraught with sore perils. At a shabby luncheon-bar in the Strand below he consumed a cup of abominable coffee and a dry sausage-roll in the same nervous haste. The barmaid in attendance was known to him. She annoyed him now by displaying in her manner the assumption that he wished to laugh and joke with her as usual. He glowered at her instead, and met her advances to conversation with a curt nod.
“You must have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning,” she commented loftily.
“Very likely,” he answered with cold brevity, counting out the necessary coppers and turning on his heel.
Outside he seemed to himself to choose the direction of his steps quite at random. He walked slowly, trying to fasten his brain down to the task of conjecturing what on earth it all meant. Alas, his mind was as empty as those desolate rooms up at the top of Dunstan’s Inn. The power of coherent speculation had left him. It was hardly possible even to arrange in decent sequence the details of what had happened. An indefinitely sweeping rage at destiny in general oppressed all his faculties. He muttered meaningless oaths under his breath as he went along, directed at an intangible “it” which was equally without form and personality, a mere abstract symbol of the universal beastliness of things.
The notion of cursing Vestalia did not suggest itself. So far as he had any intelligible thoughts about her, they were instinctively exculpatory. She seemed indeed to have behaved stupidly, but it must have been under a misapprehension of some sort. Something perverse had happened to lead her off into a foolish course of action. He resolutely declined to open his mind to any other view of her. She must have quitted the Inn for some reason which wholly satisfied her sense of honourable conduct. What was this reason? Had she conjured it up out of her own meditations, or had it been furnished to her from an external source?