This event was all the more startling to Chute, as he had been wandering from place to place, through Germany and the North of Europe, and thus few letters and no papers from England had reached him for some time past; and now it was the end of the first week of September, when the brown partridges would be learning to their cost that the tall waving wheat, amid which their little broods had thriven, was shorn on the uplands, and the sharp-bladed plough was turning up the barley-stubbles.
It may well be supposed that the contents of this paragraph among the fashionable intelligence gave our wanderer occasion for much thought; and from the bustle around him—for he had been taking his coffee at a little marble table placed literally on the pavement of the square, which, if not one of the handsomest places in Europe, is certainly the finest in the Danish capital, with its statue of Christian V., with its green plateau and flower-borders—he retired to the solitude of his own room; but even as he did so there were others, he found, who were near him, and took a gossiping interest in the paragraph.
There were several English people in the hotel, of course, for one must travel a long way to find solitude in these our days of universal locomotion. Among others there was young Charley Rakes, at whose house we have lately seen the Collingwoods—a fast youth of Belgravian breed, whom Chute did not like; and he had rather a way of keeping at full arm's-length those whom he viewed thus.
'So, so,' he heard him say to a friend; 'the old fellow is married at last, and to the Desmond. What the little birds said proves right, after all.'
'Poor Clare!' thought Chute, as a burst of laughter followed the reading of the paragraph, with great accentuation, aloud.
'Fancy Evelyn Desmond airing flannel bags for the gouty feet of old Collingwood, fomenting his bald pate—(he is bald, isn't he?)—putting his lovely teeth into a tumbler at night, unlacing his stays, and all that sort of thing, don't you know!'
From this rough jesting with names in which he had an interest so vital now, Trevor Chute, we say, gladly sought the privacy of his own room, where, stretched upon a sofa, he gave himself tip to the luxury of lonely thinking, while watching the pale blue wreaths evoked from his meerschaum bowl floating upward into the lofty ceiling overhead, while the drowsy hum of the city came through the green jalousies of the windows, which opened to the Kongens Nytorv, and faced the Theatre Royal.
Would this alliance mar for ever the chances of the Major, or redouble them, as he would be quite en famille at Carnaby Court and the town mansion in Piccadilly?
He recalled the parting words of Clare, and thrust the speculation aside as unworthy the consideration of a second. He could awaken in the morning now with other thoughts than the dull ache of the bitter olden time; for though their prospects were vague and undefined, he had her renewed promise, and now more than ever did he recall it, with the delicious threat that accompanied the renewal.
'Clare, Clare!' he muttered aloud; and with all the passionate longing of a lad of twenty, the man's heart went out to her, the absent one.