Well, this dreadful week passed over, and another, and William Maubray resigned his appointment at Paris, and resolved on the bar; and with Mr. Sergeant Darkwell’s advice, ordered about twenty pounds’ worth of law-books, to begin with, and made arrangements to enter his name at Lincoln’s Inn, which was the learned Sergeant’s, and to follow in the steps of that, the most interesting of all the sages of the law, past or present.
Vane Trevor looked in upon William very often. Gilroyd, William Maubray, even the servants, interested him; for there it was, and thus surrounded, he had seen Miss Violet Darkwell. There, too, he might talk of her; and William, too, with a bitter sort of interest, would listen, an angry contempt of Vane rising at his heart; yet he did not quite hate him, though he would often have been glad to break his head.
Trevor, too, had his grounds for vexation.
“I thought she’d have gone to church last Sunday,” he observed to Maubray, and I must allow that he had made the same statement in various forms of language no less than five times in the course of their conversation. “I think she might; don’t you? I can’t see why she should not; can you? The relationship between her and poor Miss Perfect was a very roundabout affair; wasn’t it?”
“Yes, so it was; but it isn’t that—I told you before it couldn’t be that; it’s just that she was so fond of her; and really, here, I don’t see any great temptation to come out; do you?”
“No—perhaps—no, of course, there may not; but I don’t see any great temptation to shut one’s self up either. I called at the Rectory yesterday, and did not see her. I have not seen her since poor Miss Perfect’s death, in fact.”
“So did I; I’ve called very often,” answered William; “as often as you, I dare say, and I have not seen her; and that’s odder, don’t you think? and I gather from it, I suppose, pretty much what you do.”
“Very likely; what is it?” said Vane.
“I mean that she doesn’t expect much comfort or pleasure from our society.”
William had a fierce and ill-natured pleasure in placing his friend Trevor in the same boat with himself, and then scuttling it.