I admitted a fondness for healthy and exciting fiction, when he laughed, saying—
“Well, I myself find that nearly half one reads in some of the newspapers now-a-days may be classed as fiction. Even party politics are full of fictions, more or less. Surely the public must find it very difficult to winnow the truth from all the political lies, both spoken and written. To me, elections are all mere campaigns of untruth.”
And so he again cleverly turned the drift of our conversation.
About five o’clock I left, driving back to Andover Junction, and arriving at Waterloo in time for dinner.
I took a taxi at once to Wilton Street, but there was no letter from Sylvia. She gave no sign. And, indeed, why should she, in face of her letter of farewell?
I dressed, and sat down alone to my dinner for the first time in my own dining-room since my wife’s disappearance.
Lonely and sad, yet filled with fierce hatred of those blackguardly adventurers, of whom her own father was evidently one, I sat silent, while old Browning served the meal with that quiet stateliness which was one of his chief characteristics. The old man had never once mentioned his missing mistress, yet I saw, by the gravity of his pale, furrowed face, that he was anxious and puzzled.
As I ate, without appetite, he chatted to me, as had been his habit in my bachelor days, for through long years of service—ever since I was a lad—he had become more a friend than a mere servant. From many a boyish scrape he had shielded me, and much good advice had he given me in those reckless days of my rather wild youth.
His utter devotion to my father had always endeared him to me, for to him there was no family respected so much as ours, and his faithfulness was surely unequalled.