“No,” said Bertram. “I suppose the people have gone away.”
“Looks like it, with the blinds down,” said the policeman.
“Yes.”
Bertram sauntered slowly away from his wife’s house. . . . Not even that bit of luck!
XXXVI
He walked through Kensington Gardens, where the trees were in their first glory of green, through Hyde Park, where the flower-beds were filled with tulips, down Piccadilly, with its tide of gleaming cars, until in the centre of Trafalgar Square he met Janet Welford. The chances of meeting her were about seven million to one, but he knew that he was going to do so. Or perhaps, when he met her, it seemed by some trick of his subconscious mind, the realising of expectation.
“Hullo!” she said, dodging a motor-omnibus and jumping onto a “save-my-life.” “What’s the matter?”
“What makes you think there’s anything the matter?”
She tucked her hand through his arm and told him his face looked like a haunted man’s. She commanded him to take her to tea somewhere. She had a craving for a chocolate éclair, or even two.
It was at table in a tea-shop imitating a Tudor house that Bertram told her of all the tragedy that had befallen him since his visit to Ireland, ending in the rejection of his book, which seemed a small thing to put with the death of his mother, but was a death also—of hope and courage.