"Is anyone there?" she called out in a low voice. "Is it Hew?" She only called him by that name when they were alone together.
He opened the door and came in.
"You must be cold," she said tremulously. "Do come nearer the fire."
Lingard came towards her. No, he was not cold. He had been walking, covering miles in the hour he had spent trying to tire, to deaden, himself out. It had been a terrible time of self-communion, self-reproach, self-abasement.
The state he found himself in to-night recalled with piteous vividness that episode of his stormy youth which had led to his long break with the Paches.
It was horrible that he should couple, even in thought, Athena Maule and that—that creature, over whom he had wasted, squandered, such treasures of adoring love. Rosie had been one of those young ladies who, to use a technical term, "walk on"; and because she was extraordinarily pretty, she was always placed in the front row of the foolish musical comedy of which he could still recall, not only every tune, but almost every word, so often had he been to the theatre after that first meeting.
At the end of ten days,—he had known Athena Maule ten days, what a strange coincidence!—at the end of ten days he had asked Rosie to marry him. She had shilly-shallied for a while, and then, to his rapturous surprise, she had said "Yes." How angry, how scandalised, how shocked his relations had been!
Tommy Pache—in those days old Mr. Pache had been "Tommy" to his relations—had hurried up to London and said all the usual things that one does say to a young fool on such an occasion, but even he had been struck by the girl's beauty, though of course Tommy had been careful not to let this out to the others when he had got back to them.
How it all came back to him to-night! Lingard remembered the letters he had received, the letters he had written. It had gone on for some weeks—he couldn't quite remember how long now,—that time of anger, of impatience, of longing, of rapture. And then, within a very few days of that fixed for the quiet wedding which was to take place in a city church,—he had always avoided that part of London ever since,—Rosie had become the wife of another man, of a young idiot with a vacuous face and an enormous fortune, of whom he had not even troubled to be jealous, although his presence in the flat Rosie shared with another girl had often made him impatient.