“I am going to take you back in a hansom,” said Walter. And in a few minutes they were driving to the address she had given, a florist’s shop in a street off the Edgware Road.
“I think her rooms were on the top floor,” he told Florence, when he returned, “for she looked up at the windows with a mournful air when we arrived. The house seemed neglected, and the shop had a dead-and-gone air; nothing in it but some decayed plants and a few stray slugs. It is my opinion that she is left in a garret all by herself, poor dear; and that Wimple takes himself off to his chambers, or to his Liphook friends, and has a better time.”
“He’s a horrid thing!”
“Floggie, do you know that he is our uncle Alfred?” her husband asked wickedly. She looked at him for a moment in bewilderment, then she understood.
“Walter,” she said, “if you ever say that again I will run away from you. I shall go and write a line to Mrs. Burnett’s gardener,” she added, “and tell him to meet us with the pony to-morrow; she said I was to use it, and I think it would be good for Aunt Anne not to be excited by the sight of Steggall’s waggonette. I am certain she is very unhappy.”
“I don’t know how she could expect to be anything else,” he answered. “Poor thing, what the deuce did he marry her for? There is some mystery at the bottom of it.”
Walter had divined rightly. Aunt Anne’s lodging was at the top of the house. When he left her she went slowly up the dark staircase that led to it. On the landing outside her door were her two canvas-covered boxes, one on top of the other. She looked at them for a moment, half hesitatingly, as if she were thinking of the journey they would take to-morrow, and of the things she must not forget to put into them. She turned the handle of the front-room door and walked in. Alfred Wimple was sitting by a cinder fire, over which he was trying to make some water boil. He looked up as she entered, but did not rise from the broken cane-bottomed chair.
“Why did you go out, Anne?” he asked severely, without giving her any sort of greeting.
“My dear one,” she said excitedly, going forward, “I did not dream of your being here; it is, indeed, a joyful surprise.” She put her hands on his shoulder and leaned down. He turned his head away with a quick movement, and her kiss brushed his cheek near the ear; but she pretended not to see it. “When did you come, my darling?”