But no sooner had the words, that Evie was now definitely engaged, come from Kitty's lips than I knew this division to be complete and irrevocable. Even did he withdraw in time he had still contemplated it; and in my soul I did not now believe he would withdraw. "The Devil was sick, the Devil a Saint would be." And I knew at last who his friend in Store Street was. A name, seen on a medicine bottle in his room, had leaped into my memory. His "friend" was some obscure practitioner of a doctor.
So I now became as the Giant in the story, who was so exquisitely cloven from head to middle by the magic blade that he did not feel the wound that was his death. "Cut, then!" he laughed. "Shake yourself," he was told. And he fell in twain.
A shake, and I too should fall in twain.
I will now tell you how I got that shake.
Thinking over my sudden ostracism in Pettinger's house that night I only became more and more mystified. That the Business College should no longer require me I could understand—for snobbery plays a terrible part in business. That Kitty had reproached me for my lack of trust in her about my commissionaire's post was also easily to be accounted for. Miss Angela might in truth have had a headache and have begged to be excused from receiving me. But that Evie should turn against me was inexplicable. It contradicted every tradition of her upbringing. My being forced into a humble, but not ignoble, occupation could never have made this difference in her. If anything in the whole business could be taken as a certainty, that could. And so the more I thought about it the more sure I became that, though I myself might conceal my real reason for wishing to see Archie Merridew by giving out that I merely wanted to remonstrate with him about his chattering, others were using that very giving-out as a screen for something I was in total ignorance of. Kitty's timorousness returned to me; I believed now that she had actually been trying to tell me something else, whatever it was; and so I tossed and turned on my pillow, vainly racking my brain.
I finally decided to have it out with both Kitty and Archie on the morrow.
I went up to town the next morning, and walked straight to the Business College. I did not wish, after what I had been told the night before, to go up, so I found an office boy on one of the lower floors and sent him up with word that somebody would like to see Miss Windus. Then I waited, just inside the Holburn entrance.
In a few minutes she came down, hatted and gloved. Her face looked old; her eyes were dull, and almost closed—with weeping, I was instantly sure; and she touched my sleeve almost as if she feared I might shake her hand off again.
"I thought it would be you," she said, in a dull voice. "Let's have a walk. I've something to say."
We walked without speaking along Holborn, and presently turned into the little courtyard of Staple's Inn. We sat down on the bench that surrounds the tree in the middle.