'Merciful Heavens! Such an incident! if it should get into the papers! If that curate cousin of mine were to hear the faintest whisper of it his ears would go up like windsails.'
'Then, sir, go back to the Red Lion, and at daybreak take the coach to Axminster, and thence to town. Leave me to manage matters, prudently, secretly, economically, And trust to no one else.'
CHAPTER VIII
ON THE PEBBLE-BEACH
Mr. Holwood was unable to sleep that night. Before leaving the ferryman's house he had resolved to depart for town by the coach on the morrow, and he had given orders to be called early, and to have some breakfast got ready for him.
But as he tossed in bed the past rose up before him in vivid colours, bringing with it wafts of old sentiment and tremors of old emotions. Scenes of happiness and of error revealed themselves to him bathed in light. Faces rose out of the past and looked at him reproachfully. Perhaps an old fibre in his heart that had once quivered with love was again in vibration.
'Poor Jane,' he said, and turned in his four-post bed. 'Poor Jane, would that I could but see her, myself unseen, once again.'
Then he racked his brain devising impossible schemes for catching a glimpse of her without allowing himself to be recognised. Next he fell to wondering what his child was like, a child he had never seen, never held in his arms, never kissed, and, in a manner strange to him, he was aware of a void within. He became conscious, as he never had been before, of responsibility, of the terrible truth that not only had he marred his own happiness, but that he had brought about the ruin of another, an innocent victim; and in addition that he would have his child's soul to answer for.
He turned again in bed. A fire burned in the grate. It made strange figures on the wall. Reflections as eyes winked at him, a shadow like an arm seemed to be warning or reproaching him with extended finger.