He wrote two letters, both rather long, and folded, sealed, and directed them.
One was addressed to Mrs. Bannister, Hyde Park Gardens, Bayswater; the other to Signora Picirillo, the Pilasters, Dudley Street, Northumberland Square.
Richard Thornton put both these letters in his pocket and went out to post them.
“I think I have acted for the best,” he muttered, as he went back to the hotel near the market-place; “I can do nothing more until to-morrow.”
CHAPTER VIII.
GOOD SAMARITANS.
George Vane did not come home. Eleanor kept the promise made to her faithful friend, and tried to sleep. She flung herself, dressed as she was, upon the little bed near the curtained alcove. She would thus be ready to run to her father, whenever he came in, she thought, to welcome and minister to him. She was thoroughly worn out, and she slept; a wretched slumber, broken by nightmares and horrible dreams, in which she saw her father assailed by all kinds of dangers, a prey to every manner of misfortune and vicissitude. Once she saw him standing on a horrible rock, menaced by a swiftly advancing tide, while she was in a boat only a few paces from him, as it seemed, doing battle with the black waves, and striving with all her might to reach and rescue him, but never able to do so.
In another dream he was wandering upon the crumbling verge of a precipice—he seemed a white-haired, feeble, tottering old man in this vision—and again she was near him, but unable to give him warning of his danger, though a word would have done so. The agony of her endeavour to utter the one cry which would have called that idolized father from his death, awoke her.
But she had other dreams, dreams of quite a different character, in which her father was restored to her, rich and prosperous, and he and she were laughing merrily at all the foolish tortures she had inflicted upon herself; and other dreams again which seemed so real that she fancied she must be awake: dreams in which she heard the welcome footsteps upon the stair, the opening of the door, and her father’s voice in the next room calling to her.
These dreams were the worst of all. It was terrible to awake after many such delusions and find she had been again deluded. It was cruel to awake to the full sense of her loneliness, while the sound of the voice she had heard in her dream still lingered in her ears.
The dark hours of the short summer night seemed interminable to her in this wretched, bewildered, half-sleeping, half-waking state; even longer than they had appeared when she sat up watching for her father’s return. Every fresh dream was a slow agony of terror and perplexity.