“Hope! There is no hope. I have been guilty of a base and cruel sin, and this is my punishment. God is punishing me: there is no hope when He punishes.”
“Oh, my dear! don’t say that. I think there is more hope than when man does. Let us try to do something better for you than staring out of that window. Can’t we go after Mr. Felix? He’s so fond of you I am sure if he could see your poor changed face he’d forgive you anything!”
Could there yet be hope? Oh, Eastern Star! are you there, behind the clouds? My heart beat wildly at the thought.
“Oh, yes! let us do that, let us go at once after Felix,” I cried, a fever of impatience rising within me, and taking the place of the cold numbness which had possessed me before.
“Very well,” said Anne, “we will go, but not until you have eaten a solid luncheon. I will take no step from here until you have done that.”
I saw by her face she was determined, so followed her into the dining-room. So deep a horror did I now feel of the great city, I had not the courage to start off by myself. I forced some solid food down my throat, the barouche was ordered, and in half an hour we were on the weary way to London. It was half past two when we reached Waterloo. Two days ago the place had breathed to me of pleasant anticipation, now it was full of distressing associations. The bench against the wall wore a terrible look of familiarity, so did the loungers who stared at me on the wide platform. The face of the clock was as the face of an inexorable enemy. “Too late,” it had said to me when I was striving to hasten away from London, and then it had lagged through the minutes which lost me Felix. “Too late,” it said now to my anxious heart, when I was hastening back. It seemed to me ages before we could get a cab, and again did miles and miles of streets seem to lie twixt me and my goal.
I flew up the stairs when I reached the house where Felix lodged, on and on towards the top where he had often said he lived. The first door I came to I opened. The room within was small and had a deserted look. A fire was dying in the grate, pieces of brown paper and lengths of twine lay about on the floor. One who had inhabited it had been packing there and had gone. Flushing all over with almost unbearable misery I tore at the bell. The landlady had been following me upstairs, and entered now with Anne. A stout woman with a big pale face and dark eyes that looked curiously at me.
“You are too late if you want to see Mr. Gray,” she said. “He has just left. He gave up these rooms suddenly and has gone abroad to join a relation; his grandmother, I think he said.”
As she spoke her face seemed to me to change, and to become enormously big and white like that of my inexorable enemy the clock. I think I was near swooning at that moment.
“Has he left any address?” asked Anne, divining by instinct the question I had not strength to put myself.