But there came no sound of wheels in the night, and she put her hands on the sides of the chair and got up.
“Can’t you find a cab?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve very sorry, but there doesn’t seem to be one about. Shall I go to the nearest cab rank?”
Miss Van Tuyn hesitated. Then she determined to fight her fear.
“It isn’t raining, is it?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then I’ll walk. It’s not far. I shall pick up a cab on the way probably.”
The young man looked relieved and stood aside to let her go out. He watched her as she walked down the square towards the block of flats which towered up where the pavement turned at right angles. The light from the hall shone out and made a patch of yellow about his feet. He noticed presently that the girl he was watching turned her head and looked back, almost as if she were hesitating. Then she walked on resolutely, and he stepped in and shut the door.
“Wonder if she’s afraid of going like that all by herself!” he thought. “I only wish she was my class. I wouldn’t mind seeing her home.”
Just before she was out of sight of Lady Sellingworth’s house Miss Van Tuyn looked back again. The light was gone. She knew that the door was shut and she shivered. She felt shut out. What was she going to do? She was going back to Claridge’s of course. But—after that? She longed to take counsel with someone, with someone who was strong and clear brained, and who really cared for her. But who did care for her? Perhaps for the first time in her life she was the victim of sentimentality, of what she would have thought of certainly as sentimentality in another. A sort of yearning for affection came to her. A wave of self-pity swept over her. Her independence of spirit was in abeyance or dead. Arabian, it seemed, had struck her down to the ground. She felt humiliated, terrified, and strangely, horribly young, like a child almost who had been cruelly treated. She thought of her dead father. If he had been alive and near could she have gone to him? No; for years he had not cared very much about her. He had been kind, had given her plenty of money, but he had been immersed in pleasures and had always been in the hands of some woman or other. He had not really loved her. No one, she thought with desperation, had ever really loved her. She did not ask herself whether that was her fault, whether she had ever given to anyone what she wanted so terribly now, whether she had any right to expect generosity of feeling when she herself was niggardly. She was stricken in her vanity and, because of that, she had come down to the dust.