Eleanor looked up. Yes, before the door of one of the principal hotels stood Mr. Launcelot Darrell, with two other young men. One of these men was talking to him, but he was paying very little attention. He stood upon the edge of the kerbstone, with his back half turned to his companion, kicking the pebbles on the road with the toe of his boot, and staring moodily before him.
In that one moment,—in the moment in which the pony-carriage, going at full speed, passed the young man,—the thought which had flashed, so vague and indistinct, so transient and intangible, through the mind of Eleanor Vane that morning, took a new shape, and arose palpable and vivid in her brain.
This man, Launcelot Darrell, was the sulky stranger who had stood on the Parisian boulevard, kicking the straws upon the kerbstone, and waiting to entrap her father to his ruin.
CHAPTER XXI.
ON THE TRACK.
The little pony-carriage drove on to the station; and Eleanor, like some traveller in a dream, saw the castle walls and turrets, the busy street and hurrying people, spin past her eyes and melt into confusion. She did not know how she entered the railway station, or how she came to be walking quietly up and down the platform with Mrs. Darrell. There was a choking sensation in her dry throat, a blinding mist before her eyes, and a confusion that was almost terrible to bear in her brain. She wanted to get away—anywhere, so long as it was away from all the world. In the meantime she walked up and down the platform, with Launcelot Darrell’s mother by her side.
“I am mad,” she thought, “I am mad! It cannot be so!”
Again and again, in the course of Eleanor Vane’s brief association with the widow’s son, something,—some fancy, some shadowy recollection, vague and impalpable as the faintest clouds in the summer sky above Hazlewood—had flitted across her mind, only to be blotted away before she could even try to define or understand it. But now these passing fancies all culminated in one conviction. Launcelot Darrell was the man whom she had seen lounging on the kerbstone of the boulevard on the night of her last parting with her father.
In vain she reasoned with herself that she had no justifiable grounds for this conviction—the conviction remained, nevertheless. The only foundation for her belief that Launcelot Darrell, from amongst all other men, was the one man whom she sought to pursue, was a resemblance in his attitude, as he stood lounging in the Windsor street, to the attitude of the young man on the boulevard. Surely this was the slightest, the weakest foundation on which belief ever rested! Eleanor Vane could acknowledge this; but she could not lessen the force of that belief. At the very moment when the memory of her father and her father’s death had been farthest from her thoughts, this sudden conviction, rapid and forcible as inspiration, had flashed upon her.
The matter was beyond reason, beyond argument.
The young man loitering listlessly upon the kerbstone of the Windsor street was the man who had loitered on the boulevard, waiting, sulkily enough, while his companion tempted George Vane to his destruction.