CHAPTER IX.
A MYSTERY.
‘Oh snows so pure, oh peaks so high!
I shall not reach you till I die!’
Songs of Two Worlds.
Wellfield found his way somehow to the station, and waited for the train to Frankfort, pacing about the little asphalted platform with feelings of the most horrible shame and humiliation–a longing to quit the place, to lose the recollection of it–a sensation that he belonged to a different world, a lower order of creature than she did, and that to approach her was folly, and must necessarily result in disaster, in singed feathers and maimed pinions. Blended with this was a sudden yearning, stronger than he had ever felt before, to see once more the gentle eyes of the wife who, he knew, would never love any other than him, let his shortcomings or the nobility of the other be never so strongly contrasted. Truly, could his moral stature, his innermost ich, have been disrobed then and placed naked before the eyes of men, it must have presented but a sorry, grovelling kind of figure.
The slow, jog-trot train came rumbling in, and bore him in leisurely fashion past all the little stations, till at last, long after half-past eight, they arrived at Frankfort.
He trailed his steps slowly up the street to the hotel. What he had just gone through mentally–the moral scourging he had just sustained, had exhausted him more than the hardest day of physical exertion could have done. He felt used up–todtmüde, as he dragged himself up the steps into the dazzling light of the hall, filled with piles of luggage and groups of visitors–men smoking, girls flirting with them, parties of people taking their coffee, an incessant passing to and fro, and cheerful bustle.