"On the eighteenth?"
"On the eighteenth."
I shut up my writing-desk. Within a few days, I might now hope to be in England as soon as I could receive Grosse's answer at Marseilles. Under these circumstances, it would be better to wait until I could make my inquiries, safely and independently, in my own proper person. Comparison of dates will show that if I had written to the German oculist, it would have been too late. It was now the eleventh; and Lucilla had left Ramsgate with Nugent on the fifth.
All this time but one small morsel of news rewarded our inquiries after Oscar—and even that small morsel seemed to me to be unworthy of belief.
It was said that he had been seen at a military hospital—the hospital of Alessandria, in Piedmont, I think—acting, under the surgeons, as attendant on the badly-wounded men who had survived the famous campaign of France and Italy against Austria. (Bear in mind, if you please, that I am writing of the year eighteen hundred and fifty-nine, and that the peace of Villafranca was only signed in the July of that year.) Occupation as hospital-man-nurse was, to my mind, occupation so utterly at variance with Oscar's temperament and character, that I persisted in considering the intelligence thus received of him to be on the face of it false.
On the seventeenth of the month, I had got my passport regulated, and had packed up the greater part of my baggage in anticipation of my journey back to England on the next day.
Carefully as I had tried to accustom his mind to the idea, my poor father remained so immovably reluctant to let me leave him, that I was obliged to consent to a sort of compromise. I promised, when the business which took me to England was settled, to return again to Marseilles, and to travel back with him to his home in Paris, as soon as he was fit to be moved. On this condition, I gained permission to go. Poor as I was, I infinitely preferred charging my slender purse with the expense of the double journey, to remaining any longer in ignorance of what was going on at Ramsgate—or at Dimchurch, as the case might be. Now that my mind was free from anxiety about my father, I don't know which tormented me most—my eagerness to set myself right with my sister-friend, or my vague dread of the mischief which Nugent might have done while my back was turned. Over, and over again I asked myself, whether Miss Batchford had, or had not, shown my letter to Lucilla. Over and over again, I wondered whether it had been my happy privilege to reveal Nugent under his true aspect, and to preserve Lucilla for Oscar after all.
Towards the afternoon, on the seventeenth, I went out alone to get a breath of fresh air, and a look at the shop-windows. I don't care who or what she may be—high or low; handsome or ugly; young or old—it always relieves a woman's mind to look at the shop-windows.
I had not been five minutes out, before I met my princely superintendent.
"Any news for me to-day?" I asked.