Mary saw that it would be useless to try to stop her. All she could do was to insist upon coming too, but she met with no opposition; Katharine seemed indifferent to her presence. In a few minutes they were walking along the Strand. They walked so rapidly that Mary was deluded into the belief that Katharine knew where she was going. She herself was not attentive. She was glad of the movement along lamp-lit streets in the open air. She was fingering, painfully and with fear, yet with strange hope, too, the discovery which she had stumbled upon unexpectedly that night. She was free once more at the cost of a gift, the best, perhaps, that she could offer, but she was, thank Heaven, in love no longer. She was tempted to spend the first instalment of her freedom in some dissipation; in the pit of the Coliseum, for example, since they were now passing the door. Why not go in and celebrate her independence of the tyranny of love? Or, perhaps, the top of an omnibus bound for some remote place such as Camberwell, or Sidcup, or the Welsh Harp would suit her better. She noticed these names painted on little boards for the first time for weeks. Or should she return to her room, and spend the night working out the details of a very enlightened and ingenious scheme? Of all possibilities this appealed to her most, and brought to mind the fire, the lamplight, the steady glow which had seemed lit in the place where a more passionate flame had once burnt.
Now Katharine stopped, and Mary woke to the fact that instead of having a goal she had evidently none. She paused at the edge of the crossing, and looked this way and that, and finally made as if in the direction of Haverstock Hill.
“Look here—where are you going?” Mary cried, catching her by the hand. “We must take that cab and go home.” She hailed a cab and insisted that Katharine should get in, while she directed the driver to take them to Cheyne Walk.
Katharine submitted. “Very well,” she said. “We may as well go there as anywhere else.”
A gloom seemed to have fallen on her. She lay back in her corner, silent and apparently exhausted. Mary, in spite of her own preoccupation, was struck by her pallor and her attitude of dejection.
“I’m sure we shall find him,” she said more gently than she had yet spoken.
“It may be too late,” Katharine replied. Without understanding her, Mary began to pity her for what she was suffering.
“Nonsense,” she said, taking her hand and rubbing it. “If we don’t find him there we shall find him somewhere else.”
“But suppose he’s walking about the streets—for hours and hours?”
She leant forward and looked out of the window.