Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces by Thomas W. Hanshew
page 49 of 383 (12%)
page 49 of 383 (12%)
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least, believe that I have not tried to keep your friendship by a lie,
or to atone in seeming only. Good night." He gave her no chance to reply, no time to say one single word. Deep wounds require time in which to heal. He knew that he had wounded the white soul of her so that it was sick with uncertainty, faint with dread; and, putting on his hat, stepped sharply back and let the mist take him and hide him from her sight. But, though she did not see, he was near her even then. He knew when she walked out into the light-filled street; he knew when she found a taxicab; and he did not make an effort to go his way until he was sure that she was safely started upon hers. Then he screwed round on his heel and went back into the mist and loneliness of the heath, and walked, and walked, and walked. Afterward--long afterward: when the night was getting old and the town was going to sleep, he, too, fared forth in quest of a taxi, and finding one went _his_ way as she had gone hers. In the neighbourhood of Bond Street--now a place of darkness and slow-tramping policemen--he dismissed the taxi and continued the journey along Piccadilly afoot. It was close to one o'clock when he came at length to Clarges Street and swung into it from the Piccadilly end, and moved on in the direction of the house which sheltered him and his secrets together. But, though he walked with apparent indifference, his eye was ever on the lookout for some chance watcher in the windows of the other houses; for "Captain Horatio Burbage" was supposed, in the neighbourhood, to be a superannuated seaman who maintained a bachelor establishment with the aid of an elderly housekeeper and a deaf-and-dumb |
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