Camberwell Grove was not at its best in this bleak March season. The time had been when the long narrow garden at Myrtle Cottage was carefully kept, and when Evelyn had taken a pride in the old-fashioned flower-borders and the blossoming creepers upon the verandah, but for the last two or three years she had been careless and indifferent, and one jobbing-gardener having left the neighbourhood she had taken no pains to get another in his place; nor had she done any of that weeding and watering and pruning, which had at one time helped to shorten the long light evenings. A weariness of all things had come upon her, tired out with waiting for brighter days.
He had refused Don Jose’s pressing invitation to dine in Onslow Square. He had turned his back upon the warm brightness of newly-furnished drawing-rooms, an atmosphere of hot-house flowers, great rush baskets of tulips, hyacinths, and narcissus, low vases of lilies of the valley and Parma violets; and amidst all this brightness and colour the beautiful Spanish girl, with her pale, clear complexion and soft black eyes. He had left his newly-betrothed wife reluctant to let him go, in order to face the most painful crisis that can occur in any man’s life; in order to tell the woman who had loved and trusted him that love was at an end between them; that the bond was broken, and his promise of no account.
“I expected you earlier, James,” she said, opening the door to him.
It was rarely that the door was opened by a servant when he went home. She was always waiting for his knock.
“Yes, it is late, I know. I have been detained. I have lingered a little on the way—I walked from the West End.”
“What, all the way? By the Walworth Road, that low neighbourhood you dislike so much?”
“I did not care where I walked, Evelyn. I was too miserable to think about my surroundings.”
“Miserable?” she asked, looking at him searchingly, and growing pale as she looked, as if the pallor of his face reflected itself in hers, “what should make you miserable?”
They were standing in the drawing-room, where the moderator lamp upon the table shone bright and clear upon his troubled face.
“You have lost your money, James—you have speculated—you won’t be able to buy Cheriton Chase,” she said breathlessly.