“You are not trying to tell me that you wish me to stay, surely?” he submitted drily.
She raised her head.
“Certainly not; after all, it’s your own fault you came.”
He did not answer, perhaps he could not trust himself; he raised his hat and turned away unseeingly, and Esther clutched her suit-case tightly and walked away with her head in the air, trying to look as if she knew every inch of the Gare St. Lazare and had been there thousands of times before.
But her heart was beating up in her throat, and she would have given a great deal, had it been compatible with dignity, to rush after him and beg him to stay.
She wandered out of the station, not knowing where to go, Raymond seemed to have faded into the background; she only thought of him subconsciously; it was the figure of Micky Mellowes that worried her––she could not forget him.
Supposing he had really written those letters? “But 244 he didn’t,” she told herself in an agony. “I know he didn’t.”
She took one of the letters from her suit-case and stared at the handwriting––Raymond’s writing. The whole thing was too preposterous.
She did not know what she meant to do, or where she meant to go; it no longer seemed that she had come here for any specific purpose.
The early morning greyness and chilliness had faded; the sun had risen and cleared away the mists.