Without venturing again to touch the hand she offered, he stumbled headlong out of the room and down the stairs. He took his hat from a table in the hall and let himself out of the front door before the butler could get there. He closed the door after him with a sharp bang—it was a door with a patent catch and could only be closed in that way—and as he did this and the sound re-echoed along Queen Street, the lamp in the right-hand corner of his brain suddenly went out.
By the time he came to the end of the street it had grown very dark. And as he turned a corner and found himself in a street whose name he didn't know he was unable to see anything. And then all at once he realized that Aladdin's lamp was broken in a thousand pieces, and he gave a little wild shriek of dismay. The savage hunted eyes of Mr. Thompson were gazing at him from under the helmet of a passing constable.
The trolls had got him.
Nothing could help him now. It had grown so dark that he couldn't see anything, although it was hardly seven at present of an evening in June. He almost shrieked again as he heard the sniggering voice of Auntie ascend above the gathering noises of the town: "Now, Enery, you must be a man and bear it."
He didn't know where he was now amid the maze of the little-frequented streets of Mayfair. He had lost his way and he couldn't see. He was blind already with an ever growing darkness. He was losing all sense of time and place. But the voice of Auntie was ever in his ears, exhorting him, with that shrill and peculiar snigger of which she never seemed to grow weary, to be a man and bear it, as he stumbled on and on into the night.
II
One afternoon about a week later, Edward Ambrose rang up No. 50, Queen Street, on the telephone to ask if Mary was at home. In reply he was told by Silvia that Mary had gone for a few days to Greylands to the Ellises, but her mother would be very glad if Edward would come and see her as she wished particularly to have a little talk with him. Edward certainly did not wish particularly to have a little talk with Lady Pridmore at that moment, but there was no way out of it. Thus in no very amiable frame of mind he drove to Queen Street.
Lady Pridmore was alone in the drawing-room. She received Edward with the grave cordiality that she reserved for favorites.
"It is very nice of you to come, Edward. Ring for some tea."