Allan did not pursue the argument. He was smiling to himself at the easy way in which he had been talking of his wife—their future, their very hopes of heaven—making so sure that she was to be his. He looked at his father, sitting alone with them, but not of them, and thought of his father's married life as he had seen it ever since he was old enough to observe or understand the life around him; so peaceful, so in all things what married life should be; and yet over all there had been that faint shadow of melancholy which the son had felt from his earliest years, that absence of the warmth and the romance of a marriage where love is the bond of union. Here, Allan told himself, the bond had been friendly regard, convenience, the world's approval, family interests, and lastly the child as connecting link and meeting-place of hopes and fears. Love had been missing from the life of yonder pale student, musing over half a dozen pages of modern metaphysics.
Allan rose and moved slowly towards that tranquil figure, and feeling the night air blowing cold as he approached that end of the room, he asked his father if he would like the windows shut?
"No, thank you, Allan, not on my account," Mr. Carew answered, without looking up from his book.
Had he looked up, he would have seen Allan standing between the lamplight and the window like a man transfixed.
A pale wan face had that moment vanished in the outward darkness; a face which a moment before had been looking in at one of the open lattices, a face which Allan had recognized at the first glance.
He went to the glass door, opened it quietly, and went out to the terrace, so quickly and so silently that his disappearance attracted no attention from father or mother, one absorbed in his book, the other bending over her work.
The face was the face of Mrs. Wornock; and Mrs. Wornock must be somewhere between the terrace and the gates. There was no moon, but the night was clear, and the sky was full of stars. Allan went swiftly round the angle of the house to the terrace outside the large window; but the figure that he had seen from within was no longer stationed outside the window. The terrace was empty. He went round to the front of the house, whence the carriage drive wound with a gentle curve to the gates, between shrubberies of laurel and arbutus, cypress and deodara.
Yes, the figure he had expected to see vanished round the curve of the drive as he drew near the porch, a slender figure in dark raiment, with something white about the head and shoulders. He ran along the drive, and reached the gate just in time to see Mrs. Wornock's brougham standing in the road, at a distance of about fifty yards, and to see Mrs. Wornock open the door and step in. Another moment—affording him no time for pursuit, had he even wished to pursue her—and the carriage drove away.
Allan had no doubt as to the motive of this conduct. She had come by stealth to look upon the face of the man whom she had refused to meet in the beaten way of friendship.