"If you will be good enough to accept this by way of fee," he said, slipping a napoleon into the doctor's hand, "I need give you no farther trouble."
The old man looked rather suspiciously from Mr. Fairfax to Mr. Granger and then back again. There was something queer in the business evidently, but a napoleon was a napoleon, and his fees were neither large nor numerous. He coughed feebly behind his hand, hesitated a little, and then with a sliding bow slipped from the room.
The porter lingered, determined to see the end of the romance, at any rate.
It was not long.
"Are you ready to come away?" Daniel Granger asked his wife, in a cold stern voice. And then, turning to George Fairfax, he said, "You know where to find me, sir, when you wish to settle the score between us."
"I shall call upon you to-morrow morning, Mr. Granger."
Clarissa looked at George Fairfax piteously for a moment, wondering if he had been much hurt—if there were any danger to be feared from the effects or that crushing fall. Never for an instant of her life had she meant to be false to her husband; but she loved this man; and her secret being discovered now, she deemed that the bond between her and Daniel Granger was broken. She looked at George Fairfax with that brief yearning look, just long enough to see that he was deadly pale; and then left the room with her husband, obeying him mechanically They went down the darksome staircase, which had grown so familiar to Clarissa, out into the empty street. There was a hackney carriage waiting near the archway—the carriage that had brought Mr. Granger. He put his wife into it without a word, and took his seat opposite to her; and so they drove home in profound silence.
Clarissa went straight to her room—the dressing-room in which Daniel Granger had talked to her the night before ha went to England. How well she remembered his words, and her own inclination to tell him everything! If she had only obeyed that impulse—if she had only confessed the truth—the shame and ignominy of to-night would have been avoided. There would have been no chance of that fatal meeting with George Fairfax; her husband would have sheltered her from danger and temptation—would have saved her from herself.
Vain regrets. The horror of that scene was still present with her—must remain so present with her till the end of her life, she thought. Those two men grappling each other, and then the fall—the tall figure crashing down with the force of a descending giant, as it had seemed to that terror-stricken spectator. For a long time she sat thinking of that awful moment—thinking of it with a concentration which left no capacity for any other thought in her mind. Her maid had come to her, and removed her out-of-door garments, and stirred the fire, and had set out a dainty little tea-tray on a table close at hand, hovering about her mistress with a sympathetic air, conscious that there was something amiss. But Clarissa had been hardly aware of the girl's presence. She was living over again the agony of that moment in which she thought George Fairfax was dead.
This could not last for ever. She awoke by and by to the thought of her child, with her husband's bitter words ringing in her ears,—