Finella Melfort, mounted on her favourite pad Fern; but who was this with whom she seemed on such easy and laughing terms, and with whom she was riding through the streets of London, without even the escort of a groom?
Erelong quickening their pace to a trot, they turned westward along Conduit Street, as if intending to 'do a bit of Park,' and he lost sight of them.
Her companion was one whom Hammersley had never seen before, but he could remark that he had all the manner and appearance of a man of good birth; but there was even something more than that in his bearing—an undefinable and indescribable air of interest seemed to hover about them, and Hammersley thought he might prove a very formidable rival. But surely matters had not come to that!
To letters that he had addressed to Finella at Craigengowan, under cover to 'Miss Carlyon,' no answer had ever been returned. He knew not that Dulcie was no longer there, and that the letters referred to had gone back to the Post Office. And so Finella's silence—was it indifference—seemed unpleasantly accounted for now.
He knew not her address in London. The house of the Fettercairn family was shut up, and he could not accost her while escorted by 'that fellow,' as she seemed ever to be, for on two occasions he saw them again in the Row; nor could he prosecute any inquiries, as most of the mutual friends at whose dances and garden parties he had been wont to meet her in the past times were now out of town.
It was tantalizing—exasperating!
Did she suppose he had been killed, and had already forgotten him? Did her heart shrink from a vacuum, or what? Thus pride soon supplemented jealousy.
A few days after the third occasion on which he had seen them, he was idling in the reading-room of 'The Rag'—as the Army and Navy Club is colloquially known, from a joke in Punch, and the smoking-room of which has the reputation of being the best in London; and few, perhaps none, of those who lounge therein are aware that the stately edifice occupies what was the site till 1790 of Nell Gwynne's house in Pall Mall.
'How goes it, Hammersley?' said Villiers, the aide-de-camp, who was also home on leave, and en route to join his regiment, being yet—as he grumblingly said—out of 'the Wolseley ring.' 'Has no Belgravian belle succeeded in capturing you yet—a hero, like myself, fresh from the assegais of Ulundi and all that sort of thing?'
'No—I am still at large; but you forget that by the time I reached town the season was over.'