"I think not."
Then he would have asked if they parted in peace, but her leave-taking was too abrupt even for him to frame the inquiry.
CHAPTER XIII
It surprised him, and left him vaguely disappointed. To break off their interview thus sharply seemed to him motiveless. He could see no reason for it, and his gaze followed her receding figure with speculative regret. When she was out of sight he picked the child up, and, carrying him into the cottage parlour, sat down beside the open window, smoking, and thinking of her.
It was a small room, poorly furnished, and, fretted by its limitations, the child became speedily fractious. A slipshod landlady pottered around, setting forth the crockery for dinner, while the little servant, despatched with the boy from town, mashed his dinner into an unappetising compound on a plate. From time to time she turned to soothe him with some of the loud-voiced facetiæ peculiar to the little servant species in its dealings with fretful childhood, and at these moments Carew suspended his meditations on his quondam mistress to wish for the presence of his wife. It was only the second, day of his son's visit to him, and his unfamiliarity with the arrangement was not without its effect upon his nerves.
Always dissatisfied with the present time, his capacity for enjoying the past was correspondingly keen. Reflectively consuming a chop, in full view of the unappetising compound and infancy's vagaries with a spoon, he proceeded to re-live it, discerning in the process a thousand charms to which the reality had seen him blind.
He was unable to shake off the influence of the meeting when dinner was done. Fancifully, while the child scrambled in a corner with some toys, he installed Mary in the room; imagining his condition if he had married her, and moodily watching the curls of tobacco smoke as they sailed across the dirty dishes. "Damn it!" he exclaimed, rising. But for the conviction that it would be futile, he would have gone out to search for her.
That he would see her again before he left the place he was determined. But he failed to do so both on the morrow and the next day, though he extended his promenade beyond its usual limits. He did not, in these excursions, fail to remark that a town sufficiently large to divide one hopelessly from the face one seeks, can yet be so small that the same strangers' countenances are recurrent at nearly every turn. A coloured gentleman he anathematised especially for his iteration.
Though he doubted the possibility of the thing, he could not rid himself of the idea that she would be at the theatre some evening, impelled by the temptation to look upon him without his knowledge; and he played his best now on the chance that she might be there. As often as was practicable, he scanned the house during the progress of the piece, and between the acts inspected it through the peep-hole in the curtain.