Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces by Thomas W. Hanshew
page 49 of 383 (12%)
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
DigitalOcean Referral Badge