“You are very wonderful,” he said to himself, “yet you made me very angry; you hurt me and made me furious. I called you ungenerous, and I meant it, and so you were. Yet when you look at me with your eyes like that and the colour in your cheeks, I can’t find one word to say against you.”
He went to the theatre that night. It was a successful play. All London was talking of it, but Hugh Alston never remembered what it was about. He was thinking of a girl with cold disdainful looks that changed suddenly to softness and tenderness. She sat beside him as she had sat opposite to him at dinner. On the stage the actors talked meaningless stuff; nothing was real, save this girl beside him.
“What’s the matter with you, my good fellow, is,” Hugh said to himself, as he walked back to the hotel that night, “you’re a fickle man; you don’t know your own mind. A week ago you were dreaming of Marjorie; you considered blue eyes the most beautiful thing in the world. You would not have listened to the claims of eyes of any other colour, and now—Bless her dear little heart, she’ll be happy as the day is long with Tom Arundel, with his nice fair hair parted down the middle, and her pretty scented notepaper. Of course she’ll be happy. She would have been miserable at Hurst Dormer, and so should I have been; seeing her miserable, I should have been miserable myself. But I shall go back to Hurst Dormer to-morrow and start on that renovation work. It will give me something to occupy my time and attention.”
That night, much to his surprise, Hugh found he could not sleep.
“It’s the strange bed,” he said. “It’s the noise of the London streets.” Sleeplessness had never troubled him before, but to-night he rolled and tossed from side to side, and then at last he sat bolt upright in the bed.
“Good Lord!” he said. “Good Lord, it can’t be!” He stared into the thick darkness and saw an oval face, crowned by waving brown hair, that glinted gold in the highlights. He saw a sweet, womanly, tender, smiling mouth and a pair of grey eyes that seemed to burn into his own.
“It can’t be!” he said again. And yet it was!
CHAPTER IX
THE PEACEMAKER
“Bless my soul!” said General Bartholomew. He had turned to the last page and looked at the signature. “Alicia Linden! I haven’t heard a word of her for five and twenty years. A confoundedly handsome girl she was too. Hudson, where’s my glasses?”