"Nicely, thank you, Miss O'Meara; you see I have not forgotten!" Then in a lower voice, "But I thought the Signora left you money?"
"She did, bless her; but it was here one day and gone the next! Good-night, and good luck to you," she laughed.
The little duenna of a dead genius evidently did not want him to stay, and he felt his way down the pitch dark stairs, and emerged on the street. A very small, brown hand was held out for a penny, and for the first time in his life he refused a street beggar with real regret.
"'Here one moment, and gone the next,'" he muttered, looking down the brilliantly lighted street to where the motors, carriages, and cabs crowded round the doors of a great theatre. "It's the history of the whole show in a nutshell."
If Sir Edmund was troubled at the thought that Molly believed in him, Molly was infinitely more troubled at his belief in her.
After he left her she went to her room. She had to dine out and she must get some rest first. As in most of the late eighteenth century houses in London, the bedrooms had been sacrificed to the rooms below. But Molly had the one very large room that looked over the park. She threw herself down on a wide sofa close to the silk-curtained bed. The sun glinted still on the silver backs of the brushes and teased her eyes, and she got up and drew down the blinds. The dressing-table was large and its glass top was covered with a great weight of old gilt bottles and boxes.
Miss Carew had once been amused by the comment of a young manicurist who, after expressing enthusiastic admiration of the table, had concluded with the words:
"But what I often say to myself is that it's only so much more to leave in the end."
But Molly had not laughed when the words were repeated; they gave expression to a feeling with which she sometimes looked at many things besides her dressing-table—they might all prove only so much more to leave in the end!
She sank exhausted again onto the sofa. Why had he come? Why could he not leave her alone? Did she want his friendship, his pity, his confidence? Why look at her so kindly when he must know how he hurt her? She had felt such joy when she saw that he believed in her. The idea that she was still innocent and unblemished in his eyes was just for the moment an unutterable relief. An unutterable relief, too, it had felt at the moment, to be able to accept his defence of himself. That he was still lovable, and that he had no dark thoughts of her, had been such joy, but only a passing joy. Had he not told her in horribly plain speech that he loved Lady Rose, and would love her to the end? All this, which was so vital to Molly, was but an episode in a friendship that was a detail in his life!