He would go out on the sea front and think. Think about what? He knew too well.
Of course, Miss Le Breton would learn to love sunny Dan, even if she did not do so already. Alvin evidently favored the idea, or why did he ask Dan to spend a week-end at the White House?
As Philip strode down Cannon Place, his cap over his eyes, he felt a sense of loneliness that was almost torture. He realized with a brutal frankness which came upon him at times when face to face with himself, that he was not lovable; that, indeed, there was something actually repellent about him at times.
Just now he took a savage pleasure in dissecting himself. He looked for faults as carefully as a medical student searches for nerves in a fat “subject.”
He was fault-finding. He wounded people recklessly. He was ungrateful and overbearing and selfish and vain—but once, a pure young girl had loved him, loved him with all the strength of a first passion. To her innocent inexperience he had been a hero, a demi-god. She lay in her grave away in Qu’Appelle. Canada was frozen up now, and the great snows were burying Eweretta deeper and deeper still. Was she colder or more lonely in her prairie grave than he felt here in gay Brighton? Scarcely.
He came to the corner of Cannon Place and stood looking into the window of the big jeweller’s shop which is there. It was brilliantly lit now, and exquisite jewels shone on their satin and velvet beds.
It occurred to Philip for the first time to wonder what had become of the jewelry he remembered John Alvin to have bought for Eweretta in Bond Street. They had been pretty trinkets and had cost a good deal of money. John Alvin had rather vulgarly boasted of the fact.
Perhaps these trinkets had passed to Thomas Alvin with the rest on Eweretta’s death, and he might have turned them back into money.
Certainly Miss Le Breton did not seem to possess any jewelry. She never wore any, at all events.
The ring (it was a half-hoop of pearls) which he—Philip—had given to Eweretta, had been sent back to him by Thomas Alvin.