And he went.
He had been absent but a week when I received the telegram announcing his intended return. I stood—with my back against the mantel, and hands warming themselves behind my sheltering coat-tails—eager to recognise his rampant mount of the stairs, to feel the clasp of his hand or its thump on my shoulder-blade, and hear his cheery "Congratulate me, old fellow!" that I knew must come. A cab stopped outside, and a key turned in the lock. Then a slow, heavy tread ascended. We met in the passage. There was no need for more than a glance at him to abridge the exuberance of welcome that had bubbled to my lips. I settled with the cabman, and in a cowardly fashion lingered unduly outside among the rugs and the travelling impedimenta. I felt somehow that he would prefer to come face to face with his home in silence. He drank a pretty stiff dose of brandy before sitting down, and moved the lamp away from his eyes.
"Letters," I indicated.
"Bother letters! Open them or throw them in the fire."
I did neither, but transferred them to his bureau. Then, seeing he was disinclined for conversation, I relit my old briar pipe that had been suffered to go out, and lolled in an arm-chair facing the fender. Presently I surveyed him from the side of an eye. His chin was sunk on his chest, he was staring at his boots with the blank look of a gambler who has staked his last. There was something in his attitude that made me wish myself a dog or a woman, that I might lick, or croon, or croodle some softness into that stony mask. The silence was so long—so pregnant with unsyllabled anguish—that at last I closed a warm hand over his fingers as they clasped the arm-end of his chair.
"Well?"
"Well," he said, huskily, starting a little from his coma and poking a coal with the toe of his boot, "it's over."
"So I suppose; and the pearl was not——"
"Not for my handling," he interrupted. "I knew you'd think something hard of her, but you won't, you won't when I tell you——"
He stretched his hand to his glass and emptied it before continuing.