That you loved me still the same...."
He took out the telegram and unfolded it. It ran—
"Come at once. Leonard is ill. Janey."
CHAPTER VII WOODS AT NIGHT
The little star melody wailed on, rippled characteristically and died. Even then Nigel did not move, he sat with his hands dropped between his knees, still holding Janey's telegram. He seemed to be sitting alone, in a black corner of space, stricken, blank, forsaken.
Then suddenly he recovered himself. "Come at once." He must go at once. He sprang to his feet, pushed his way past one or two meaningless shadows who called after him meaningless words, and the next minute found himself in the passage behind the stage. Seizing his hat and overcoat from the wall, he hurried to the stage-door. The street outside was quiet, at either end were lights and commotion, but the street itself was plunged in echoing peace. A strange fear assaulted Nigel—he hurried into Oxford Street and hailed a taxi. Then he knew what he was afraid of—the opportunity to sit and think.
He tried not to think—he tried to find refuge from thought even in the words that had smitten him. "Come at once. Leonard is ill."—he repeated them over and over, striving for mere mechanical processes. The taxi threaded swiftly through the traffic, the lights swung past with the roar and the whistles. Luckily the streets were not much crowded at that hour—it was just before the closing of the theatres and the consequent rush....
He was at Victoria, and a porter had told him that the next train for East Grinstead did not start for half-an-hour. He paced miserably up and down, cursing the blank time, gnawed by conjectures. "Leonard is ill." Len was hardly ever ill, and it must be something serious, or Janey would not have said "Come at once." It must have been sudden too, for the two telegrams had been handed to him together. Perhaps there had been an accident. Perhaps Len was dead. Ice seemed to form suddenly on Nigel's heart—Janey might be trying to break the news gently by saying his brother was ill. No doubt Len was dead—— Oh, Lenny, Lenny!