He left the common. A lamplighter was lighting the lamps. A thin evening haze was on the air. If only he had stayed at home that fateful afternoon! Who, what had induced him, enticed him to venture out? And even with the thought welled up into his mind an intense desire to go to the old green time-worn churchyard again; to sit there contentedly alone, where none heeded the completest metamorphosis, down beside the yew-trees. What a fool he had been. There alone, of course, lay his only possible chance of recovery. He would go to-morrow. Perhaps Sheila had not yet discovered his absence; and there would be no difficulty in repeating so successful a stratagem.
Remembrance of his miserable mistake, of Miss Sinnet, faintly returned to him as he swiftly mounted the steps to his porch. Poor old lady. He would make amends for his discourtesy when he was quite himself again. She should some day hear, perhaps, his infinitely tragic, infinitely comic experience from his own lips. He would take her some flowers, some old keepsake of his mother’s. What would he not do when the old moods and brains of the stupid Arthur Lawford, whom he had appreciated so little and so superficially, came back to him.
He ran up the steps and stopped dead, his hand in his pocket, chilled and aghast. Sheila had taken his keys. He stood there, dazed and still, beneath the dim yellow of his own fanlight; and once again that inward spring flew back. ‘Brazen it out; brazen it out! Knock and ring!’
He knocked flamboyantly, and rang.
There came a quiet step and the door opened. ‘Dr Simon, of course, has called?’ he inquired suavely.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Ah, and gone’—as I feared. And Mrs Lawford?’
‘I think Mrs Lawford is in, sir.’
Lawford put out a detaining hand. ‘We will not disturb her; we will not disturb her. I can find my way up; oh yes, thank you!’
But Ada still palely barred the way. ‘I think, sir,’ she said, ‘Mrs Lawford would prefer to see you herself; she told me most particularly “all callers.” And Mr Lawford was not to be disturbed on any account.’