But he walked home that night, after leaving his friends, feeling miserably that it would have been better if he had buried himself for ever in Arcadia Street; if in some impossible way, he could have forgotten this selfish purposeless life he had always lived, and could have flung himself into some real work that would have brought him nearer in thought and feeling to the girl. Not for the first time he cried out against artificiality; metaphorically speaking, he wanted to put on rough clothing and thick boots, and plunge into the real fierce work of the world.
Some sense of the injustice of the world in meting out such different lots to such different women urged him, after a lapse of days during which he had been at the beck and call of Enid, to go back to Arcadia Street. He told himself that it would be merely an experimental visit; he meant to see if something could not be done to shake old Meggison into an understanding of his responsibilities, and perhaps even to urge the derelict brother into an attempt to earn a living. That was what he told himself; in the end, of course, it amounted to his going with the prospect of seeing the girl, and of doing something, in a wholly indefinite way, for her personally.
"'I MAY GO AWAY AGAIN AT A MOMENT'S NOTICE.'" Page 66
He was a little shy about meeting her; so many ridiculous suggestions had been thrown to him by Jordan Tant, and by Enid and her mother, concerning this girl, that the old freedom between them, so far at least as he was concerned, seemed a thing of the past. Even when that summer evening arrived when, leaning over the wall, he saw her seated in her garden, and called to her, it was with a new constraint.
"I've come back, you see," he said.
She was genuinely very glad to see him; he found himself wondering if the eyes of Enid could by any chance ever light up at his coming as did the eyes of this child. Things were different in Arcadia Street, he knew; almost he wished that they were not—almost he wished that this happy familiarity might obtain in other places with which he was more naturally in touch.
"I thought—thought you were not coming back," said the girl. "And yet I hoped——"
"Hoped that I was—eh?" he supplemented. "Even now, I don't know how long I may be able to stop here; I may go away again at a moment's notice—and never come back at all. Don't look so grave about it; you can go on making-believe, you know, just as well as ever."
"It won't be quite the same," she said. "You see, in that you've helped me—because, as I told you, you understood."