Where was she, I wondered? I dared not write to Gardone, as she had begged me not to do so. She had left there, no doubt, for was she not a constant wanderer? Was not her stout, bald-headed father the modern incarnation of the Wandering Jew?
May lengthened into June, with its usual society functions and all the wild gaiety of the London season. The Derby passed and Ascot came, the Park was full every day, theatres and clubs were crowded, and the hotels overflowed with Americans and country cousins. I had many invitations, but accepted few. Somehow, my careless cosmopolitanism had left me. I had become a changed man.
And if I were to believe the woman who had come so strangely and so suddenly into my life, I was a marked man also.
Disturbing thoughts often arose within me in the silence of the night, but, laughing at them, I crushed them down. What had I possibly to fear? I had no enemy that I was aware of. The whole suggestion seemed so utterly absurd and far-fetched.
Jack Marlowe came back from Denmark hale and hearty, and more than once I was sorely tempted to explain to him the whole situation. Only I feared he would jeer at me as a love-sick idiot.
What was the secret held by that grey-faced country parson? Whatever it might be, it was no ordinary one. He had spoken of the seal of The Confessional. What sin had Sylvia Pennington confessed to him?
Day after day, as I sat in my den at Wilton Street smoking moodily and thinking, I tried vainly to imagine what cardinal sin she could have committed. My sole thoughts were of her, and my all-consuming eagerness was to meet her again.
On the night of the twentieth of June—I remember the date well because the Gold Cup had been run that afternoon—I had come in from supper at the Ritz about a quarter to one, and retired to bed. I suppose I must have turned in about half-an-hour, when the telephone at my bedside rang, and I answered.
“Hulloa!” asked a voice. “Is that you, Owen?”
“Yes,” I replied.