At one o’clock he got up, and, putting on his hat and coat, went into the clerks’ room: “I shall not be here this afternoon,” and then painfully he hesitated. Yesterday he would have added, “Should you want me—get through to Bonnie Doon,” but that stinging sentence in Mrs. Faring’s letter stopped his saying that.
“Should you want me,” he said quietly, “I shall be at the Thatched House after three o’clock.”
He had tried to speak, to look, as usual, but he knew that he had failed.
In the hall he waited irresolutely. No, he would not go out, as usual, through the courtyard, as perhaps another kind of man would have done. Grimly he told himself that, in a sense, he accepted defeat. He felt he could not face again the stares of his workpeople and of his fellow townsmen.
Taking a rusty key off its hook, he walked through the now empty shuttered rooms which had once been the home of his wife’s parents. He hurried through the silent, cobwebbed kitchen into the narrow, sunless garden. A door at the bottom of the garden led into an alley which was an unfrequented and generally more or less deserted way of getting out of the town.
He hurried through the door, and once out there he felt as if he breathed a lighter air. And yet, as he hastened along, it seemed to his excited fancy that he could hear the busy murmur of voices, cruel, spiteful, eager voices—all talking of him, of his poor dead wife, and, hideous thought, Jean.
At last, after passing through some mean and sordid streets, he reached the open country, and the clean, keen air worked something like a miracle in his tortured brain. By the time he opened the front door of Bonnie Doon he was almost himself again, filled with joy at the thought of seeing Jean, the only human being to whom he could pour out his heart, and who could bring him comfort.
Elsie, the cook, came quickly out of her kitchen.
“Eh, Mr. Garlett,” she exclaimed, “I’ve been watching for ye! D’you mind going into the doctor’s study? Miss Jean’s not down yet.”
“She’s not ill?”