He had gone to Cadogan Square (it was August 13th) as quickly as a taxi could take him, and by a blessed stroke of luck he had found Miss Pomeroy alone. In a flash all had come right between them. That had only been nine weeks ago, and now they were to be married to-morrow…
Sherston had been standing a long time at that casement of his which commanded the huge gray mass of Somerset House, when at last he turned round, and went quickly across the room to the other, western, window.
Even in the gathering darkness what a faery view was there! Glad as he was to know that after to-night he would never again see this living room in its present familiar guise—for he had arranged with a furniture dealer to come and take everything left in it away, within an hour of his departure—he told himself that never again could he hope to live with such a view as that on which he was gazing out now.
The yellowing branches of the trees which have their roots deep in the graveyard of the old Savoy Chapel formed, even in mid-October, a delicious screen of living, moving leaves. Far below, to his left, ran the river Thames, its rushing waters full of a mysterious, darksome beauty, and illumined, here and there, with the quivering reflection of shadowed white, green and red lights. Sherston in his heart often blessed the Sepelin scare which had banished the monstrous, flaring signs which, till a few months ago, had so offended his eyes each time that he looked out into the night, towards the water.
The lease of a fine old house in Cheyenne Walk had been chosen by Mr. Pomeroy as his daughter's wedding gift, and already certain of Sherston's personal possessions had been moved there. But he was taking with him as little as possible, and practically nothing from this memory-haunted room.
It was the big, light, airy, loft-like apartment which had attracted him in these chambers fifteen years ago, when he had first come to London from the Midlands, at the age of three-and-twenty. It was here, five years later, that he had come straight back from the Soho Registry Office with the young woman whom he had quixotically drawn up out of a world—the nether world—where she had been happier than she could ever hope to become with him. For Kitty Brawle—her very surname was symbolic—was one of those doomed creatures who love the mud, who never really wish to leave the mud—who feel scraped and sad when clean.
Unhappy Sherston! The noblest thing he had ever done, or was ever likely to do, in his life, proved, for a time at least, his undoing. Kitty had made him from generous mean, from unsuspecting suspicious, and during the wretched year they had spent together she had had a disastrous effect on his work. At last, acting on the shrewd advice of one of those instinctive men of the world of which Bohemia is full, he had bought her a billet in a theatrical touring company. There, by an extraordinary chance, Kitty made a tiny hit—sufficiently of a hit to bring her from an American impresario a creditable offer, contingent on her fare being paid to the States.
Gladly, how gladly only he himself had known—Sherston had taken her passage in the Titanic, Kitty's own characteristic choice of a boat. And he had done more. though short of money, he had given Kitty a hundred pounds.
Four days after their parting had come the astounding news of the sinking of the liner, followed, by Sherston, by a period of strange, painful suspense, filled with the eager scanning of lists, cables to and from America, finally terminated by an official intimation that poor Kitty had gone down in, and with, the ship.
Sherston's imagination was inconveniently vivid, and for a few poignant weeks his wife's horrible end haunted him. But after a while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from there he came back with his nerves in better order than they had ever been.