‘What a home-coming! Oh, what a dreadful coming home!’
Jerome let her cry in the corner of the settee, and took no notice of her; till about seven o’clock he rose from his chair, went to her and put his hand upon her shoulder. She looked up, her face all tear-stained and pitiful; her golden hair tumbled about her head.
‘I am going to the Abbey, and shall not be in till after ten o’clock,’ he said. ‘Am I to tell Miss Bolton that I may take you to see her to-morrow, or not?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Avice, hopelessly.
‘Ah, you will know by to-morrow. I shall tell her that I intend to bring you. Good-evening. I should advise you to go to bed before long.’
But she did not go to bed. She sat in a stupor of grief and bewilderment. While she had been crying, Jerome had written a letter. Her passion had irritated him, and he had allowed his irritation to influence his words to Sara. He had ‘set her free’ (no need to put such a pitiful document into print–it was feeble and despicable, illogical, and yet stabbing like a dagger, as such productions–the efforts of selfishness to kick down the ladder by which it has risen–always must be). ‘He would not stand in her way, he who had nothing to offer her–no faintest prospect of a home, or of anything worthy to give her.’ In short, under the pretence of consulting her interests, Jerome Wellfield very decidedly asked Sara Ford to dismiss him, to release him from his bond.
Avice, of course, knew nothing of this. She only knew that she had come home to find everything miserable, to find an impostor in the brother to whom she had given the whole worship of her youthful heart. And yet, was he an impostor, or was he not rather a very wicked, dark, bad man, like some Byronic hero?
She sat in the corner of the settee, darkly brooding, when some one tapped quickly at the front-door; and then she heard it open, and a man’s step in the little porch. Some one entered, saying in a slow, lazy voice:
‘I say, Wellfield, I thought I’d call to wish—— Oh, I beg your pardon!’ followed in a more animated accent.
Avice looked at the speaker, and saw a tall, clumsy-looking young man peering at her, rather than looking, from a pair of short-sighted brown eyes. On his homely, square-cut face there was an expression of some embarrassment, not partaken of in the least by Miss Wellfield. She rose, made a gracious bow, mentally casting a reflection of some dismay upon her probably dishevelled appearance, and said, with self-possession: