With that the subject dropped.
Next morning I took leave of them all, and promising to meet Eric a few days later, took the train up to town to keep the secret tryst with my little friend who had so suddenly disappeared.
As I stood at the kerb looking up and down the wet pavement with its busy, hurrying crowd carrying umbrellas, I knew that I had commenced a very dangerous game. Would she keep her appointment? Did she really intend to go into voluntary exile in some mean street in one of the dismal southern suburbs? Was it possible that she who had from her birth been used to every luxury and extravagance could pose successfully as the wife of a compositor with forty shillings a week?
Ah! would not her very voice, her smart expressions, betray her as a lady?
I heard the rumbling of a train below, and once again up the grimy stairs came a long string of eager men and women returning from the City to their homes, tumbling over each other in their anxiety to get back after the day’s toil. They swept past me along the Pentonville Road, and then I stood again, reflecting and watching, until suddenly a figure in neat black halted before me, and I found myself face to face with the fugitive.
“Tibbie!” I cried. “Then you’ve really come, after all?”
“Of course,” was her answer in a low, half-frightened tone. “When I make an appointment I keep it. Where shall we go? We can’t talk here, can we?”
A hansom was passing, and hailing it we got in hurriedly. I told the man to drive across Waterloo Bridge to the Elephant and Castle, a neighbourhood where we would be both quite unknown. Then, as I sank beside her, she asked, with a pretty, mischievous smile,—
“Well, Wilfrid, and how do you like me as your wife?”
“My wife!” I echoed. “By Jove, yes. I forgot that,” and I recollected the strange game I was playing.