She turned towards her companion with fuller attention than what she had previously accorded him.
As John walked through the rooms scanning the crowd, the possibility of meeting Di did not strike him. With a frightful clutch of the heart he caught sight of her. A man who instantly aroused his animosity was talking eagerly to her. Something in her appearance startled him. Was it the colour of her gown that made her look so pale, the intense light that gave her calm dignified face that peculiar worn expression? She had a faint fixed smile as she talked that John did not recognize, and that, why he knew not, cut him to the quick.
Was this Di? Could this be Di?
He knew she had seen him. He hesitated a moment and then went towards her. She received him without any change of countenance. The fixed smile was still on her lips as he spoke to her, but the lips had whitened. Their eyes met for a moment. Oh! what had happened to Di's lovely eyes that used to be so grave and gay?
He stammered something—said he was looking for some one—and passed on. She turned to speak to some one else as he did so. He strangled the nameless emotion which was choking him, and made his way into the next room. He had a vague consciousness of being spoken to, and of making herculean efforts to grind out answers, and then of pouncing on the secretary of the man he was looking for, who told him his chief had suddenly and unexpectedly started for Paris that afternoon on affairs of importance.
John mechanically noted down his address in Paris and left the house.
The necessity of remembering where his feet were taking him recalled him somewhat to himself. He pulled himself together, and slackened his pace.
"I will go to Paris by the night express," he said to himself, the feverish longing for action increasing upon him as this new obstacle met him. He dared not remain in London. He knew for a certainty that if he did he should go and see Di. Neither could he write to Lord —— all that he must tell him, or put into black and white the favour he had to ask of him—the first favour John had ever needed to ask, namely, to be helped by means of Lord ——'s interest to some post in which he could for the moment support himself and Mitty.
As he turned up St. James's Street, he remembered with irritation that he had not yet procured Colonel Tempest's and Archie's address. While he hesitated whether to go on, late as it was, to Brook Street for it, he remembered that he could probably obtain it much nearer at hand, namely, at Archie's rooms in Piccadilly. Archie, who was a person of much pink and monogrammed correspondence, would probably have left his address behind him, stuck in the glass of the mantelpiece, as his manner was. The latch-key he had lent John in the autumn, when John had made use of his rooms, was still on his chain. He had forgotten to return it. He let himself in, went upstairs to the second floor, and opened the door of the little sitting-room.