“You speak to me as if I was ten!” Mrs. Elles said. “I am not sure if I mind? What is mischief?”
“Oh, you know—things that might prejudice you—in your new position. I need not mention them—you know the kind of thing?”
“Can I go to see the Rembrandts with Dr. André?”
“The poor man’s in love with you—but there would be no harm in your going to the Rembrandts with him, I think,” Egidia answered easily.
By ten o’clock of the next day she was gone.
. . . . . . . .
Mrs. Elles felt a really irresistible impulse, to do what she did. “It was as if something called me!” she said afterwards. “I felt that I had to see him.”
So two days after the day on which her friend had left London, the dreary gas lamps of Bedford Square fluttered, and the black mud shone prismatically under the feet of a little woman, wandering without judgment or system, round and round the square, enquiring of nodding applewomen, of burly policemen, of scurrying street arabs, and honouring them all with the gracious smile of drawing rooms, the way to No. 99 in that region.
“Why, there, Missie, under yer nose,” said the last of the policemen, pointing to the number, written black and jagged over the fanlight of the house near whose very doorstep she was standing. He thought the young lady a little touched in the head; there was indeed a wild look in her eyes, born of the consciousness of her own audacity, and the wild joy of seeing Rivers again.
She rang the bell, and a grim, demure-looking Scotch servant—Rivers’ staid old housekeeper, of whom she had often heard—answered it.