Lorimer made no answer. He understood his feeling, and realized the situation as sufficiently grim. To be armed with a weapon meant for the chastisement of a man whom Death had so suddenly claimed was, to say the least of it, unpleasant. Yet the horsewhip could scarcely be thrown away in Piccadilly—such an action might attract notice and comment. Presently Philip spoke again.
"He was actually married all the time!"
"So it seems;" and Lorimer's face expressed something very like contempt. "By Jove, Phil! he must have been an awful scoundrel!"
"Don't let's say any more about him—he's dead!" and Philip quickened his steps. "And what a horrible death!"
"Horrible enough, indeed!"
Again they were both silent. Mechanically they turned down towards Pall Mall.
"George," said Errington, with a strange awe in his tones, "it seems to me to-day as if there were death in the air. I don't believe in presentiments, but yet—yet I cannot help thinking—what if I should find my Thelma—dead?"
Lorimer turned very pale—a cold shiver ran through him, but he endeavored to smile.
"For God's sake, old fellow, don't think of anything so terrible! Look here, you're hipped—no wonder! and you've got a long journey before you. Come and have lunch. It's just two o'clock. Afterwards we'll go to the Garrick and have a chat with Beau Lovelace—he's a first-rate fellow for looking on the bright side of everything. Then I'll see you off this afternoon at the Midland—what do you say?"
Errington assented to this arrangement, and tried to shake off the depression that had settled upon him, though dark forebodings passed one after the other like clouds across his mind. He seemed to see the Altenguard hills stretching drearily, white with frozen snow, around the black Fjord; he pictured Thelma, broken-hearted, fancying herself deserted, returning through the cold and darkness to the lonely farm-house behind the now withered pines. Then he began to think of the shell-cave where that other Thelma lay hidden in her last deep sleep,—the wailing words of Sigurd came freshly back to his ears, when the poor crazed lad had likened Thelma's thoughts to his favorite flowers, the pansies—"One by one you will gather and play with her thoughts as though they were these blossoms; your burning hand will mar their color—they will wither and furl up and die,—and you—what will you care? Nothing! No man ever cares for a flower that is withered,—not even though his own hand slew it!"