'Off her blessed chump, by jingo!' muttered 'Jeames,' as he thrust the money into the pocket of his yellow-plush breeches.
Escaping recognition by Mademoiselle Rosette, who was having a flirtation in the hall with John Gaiters (Sir Redmond's man), Mary, in a tumult of distracting thoughts, cabbed it back to St. Mary's Terrace, so called, though it is a narrow street; but that matters nothing in London, where thoroughfares are called roads, that are streets or squares, terraces or crescents, and even hills, such as Ludgate, or vales, such as Maida, without being the slightest approach to anything of the kind; but such are some of the many idiosyncrasies of Babylon that puzzle the intelligent foreigner.
Mary was a wise girl; she knew that the wounded heart of Ellinor, suffering from certain remorse at her treatment of the loving Robert Wodrow, and mortification at the conduct of Sleath in never attempting to visit or seek an explanation, would not be healed by telling all that she had overheard, and more that she suspected, now only said that she had recognised him and Colville at the ball and nothing more.
But this reticence proved rather a mistake eventually.
CHAPTER IV.
'SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR!'
After that night at Number 60, Park Lane, a terrible sense of humiliation oppressed Mary, and she knew not what to do next. Such rencontres, she thought, were not likely to happen in the mighty world of London; yet the next meeting she had with Colville occurred very soon after, and gave her nearly as great a shock as that at the ball.
It was on a murky October Sunday afternoon when Mary, finding herself near Westminster Abbey, entered the vast building, lured alike by curiosity to see it and hear the service, for which the bells were tolling.
For a moment she looked about her and saw how the mighty cruciform church towered skyward above the dingy houses, shops, and streets that lie so near it on one side, and the handsome, open space, with all its railings and statues, on the other, and, tripping lightly over the flat gravestones, she entered by the gloomy northern door, and, after a little timid doubt and hesitation, proceeded to an empty pew in the north transept.
The vast height of the shafted columns, the darkened roof that sprang from them, the dusky depths and ghostly uncertainties of the edifice, which was of a size and space beyond her conception; the faint, leaden light of the London afternoon that stole through its lancet windows, and the grim aspect of the tombs which crowd and disfigure the long drawn aisles, were all solemn and oppressive to Mary, yet curiosity detained her, and she was glad to see a few persons—but how very few they seemed—gathering to hear the service, while the black-robed vergers glided about, imparting, she thought, something spectral to the vistas of the place; and to her unaccustomed eyes the white floating surplices of the officiating clergymen and of the choir-boys seemed something spectral too.