Her attention aroused by those furtive sounds below, she had leaned far out from the casement and peered down into the darkness. She had heard the soft thud of feet as Holles dropped to the street, and immediately thereafter the patter of his retreating footsteps. Very faintly she thought she made out at the same time the receding figure of a man, a deeper shadow amid shadows. But however little she may have seen with the eyes of the flesh, she saw all with the eyes of her imagination. She was on the point of crying out, but suddenly checked herself, fearful of rousing the watchman and setting afoot a pursuit which, if successful, might be attended by direst consequences for Holles. And it was only that same dread that lent her strength to repress the instinctive impulse to call him back and arrest that flight of his.
Then she steadied herself. After all, it was possible that she was at fault, that she was the victim of her own imaginings, that her overwrought senses had played a trick upon her. But the doubt was unbearable. She must make sure at once. With trembling, fumbling fingers she kindled a light. Then with a rug wrapped about her over her night-rail, she made her way below. Thus she descended the stairs for the first time, and as she went she blamed herself bitterly—in her conviction that she would find things as she feared—for not having earlier taken this step and gone to seek him who remained so obdurately absent.
When on the following morning an anxious Mrs. Dallows entered the dining-room in fearful quest of her charge, she found her there, at once to her infinite relief and infinite distress. In her night-rail, the rug fallen from her bare shoulders, Nancy sat on the daybed under the open window. She was pale and dry-eyed, but with such pain and misery stamped upon her face that the sight of tears would have been comforting by contrast. Beside her was a candlestick in which the single candle had been burnt to the socket, about her the floor was strewn with the sheets of Holles’s letter, which had slipped from her nerveless fingers.
That letter had accomplished all that Holles could have hoped from it. It had quenched completely and finally any lingering embers of her scorn. It had aroused compassion, and the old love, and finally despair. For by his own act he was deliberately lost to her again. He was gone, irrevocably, as he announced, and by the very manner of his going had made himself an outlaw.
CHAPTER XXV HOME
Out of concern for her charge, Mrs. Dallows at once dispatched the watchman for Dr. Beamish, and, when the physician arrived some little while later, she acquainted him with the Colonel’s evasion and the consequent partially stunned condition in which Miss Sylvester appeared to move.
The good doctor, who had come to conceive some measure of affection for those two, rooted, perhaps, in a certain pity which their mysterious, but obviously unhappy, relations aroused in him, went at once in deepest distress to seek Miss Sylvester, who had meanwhile returned to her own room above-stairs. He found her affliction the more distressing to observe by virtue of her unnatural composure.
“This is terrible, my dear,” he said, as he took her hands. “What can have driven that unhappy man to so ... so unfortunate a course?”