“Oh,” she cried softly—with immense relief on her dear face—“oh, Anthony, I'm so glad. Because he never could have felt in that terrible way toward you. He did n't, Anthony, did he?”
I shook my head.
The train rolled into the station-shadows, and stopped.
“Because,” she was saying in my ear, as we moved slowly out into the corridor, “hard as he was sometimes, and positive, and all shaken and tortured, even he knew the real things when he found them, Anthony. It would have hurt him, but he would have been fair—once he could really get it clear.” And she whispered, right there in the corridor of the car, with passengers crowding behind us and before—“I'm so glad he knew it was you!”
Hindmann tells me that we passed Sir Robert to-day in the railway station at Tientsin. It seems that that old man and I actually brushed sleeves.
I did n't know this. Did n't see him at all, in fact. But Hindmann says he looked straight at me, without the slightest sign of recognition—first at Heloise and then at me.
He had a young woman with him; a rather good-looking girlish person, very thin, but “with a way about her.” Hindmann has seen her before. He thinks she ran a gambling club in Macao when he was last on the Coast.
Sir Robert himself impressed him as looking extremely old and not a little feeble, with a slight paralysis that has twisted his face up curiously on the left side.
I am glad I did not see him. I hope I never shall.