“Shall we go on?  It isn’t more than fifty paces to the road; and you may rely upon finding a taxicab there.  Would you like me to show you the way?”

“Yes, please.  I—­oh, don’t think me unsympathetic, unkind, severe.  It is such a shock; it is all so horrible—­I mean—­that is....  Let me get used to it.  I shall never tell, of course—­no, never!  Now, please, may we not walk faster?  I am very, very late as it is; and they will be worrying at home.”

They did walk faster, and in a minute more were at the common’s end.  Cleek stopped and again lifted his hat.

“We will part here, Miss Lorne,” he said.  “I won’t force my company on you any further.  From here, you are quite beyond all danger, and I am sure you would rather I left you to find a taxi for yourself.  Good night.”  He did not even offer to put out his hand.  “May I say again, that I am not sorry I told you?  Nor did I ever expect you would, take it other than like this.  It is only natural.  Try to forgive me; or, at the 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 maid of all work.

But no one was on the watch to-night; and it was only when he came at last to the pillared portico of his own residence that he found any sign of life from one end of the street to the other.  He did find it then, however; for the boy, Dollops, was sitting huddled up on the top step with the thick shadow of the portico making a safe screen for him.