From the avenue he wandered across the lawn and under the trees, like a restless or unquiet spirit, his unpleasant face wearing an uneasy expression, and his eyes, which were seldom raised from the ground, shifted always from side to side.
'I may have to make a clean bolt for it,' he muttered as Finella came suddenly upon him, and, though detesting him, she was too gentle not to feel some pity for his crushed appearance.
'Shafto, why are you so disturbed?' she asked. 'Of what are you afraid?'
'Of what?' he queried almost savagely.
'Yes.'
'I don't know.'
'Who then can know?'
'I tell you I don't know what to fear, but things are looking infernally dark for me. I am going down the hill at a devil of a pace, and with no skid on.'
'I do not understand your phraseology,' said Finella coldly.
'Understand, then, that many of my troubles lie at your door,' said Shafto, turning abruptly from her, as he thus referred to her aversion to himself and certainly not unnatural preference for Vivian Hammersley, and that much of the money he had raised had been advanced on the chances of his lucrative marriage with her.