He tried to laugh at himself as he walked slowly away from Rachel’s house.  He told himself that he was absurd, that an absence of a few days was nothing.  He turned his steps mechanically in the direction of his mother’s lodgings.  At any rate, he could tell her.  He could talk about this cruel woman to her.  The smart was momentarily soothed by his mother’s painful joy.  He wrenched himself somewhat out of himself as she wept the tears of jealous love, which all mothers must weep when the woman comes who takes their son away.  “I am so glad,” she kept repeating.  “These are tears of joy, Hughie.  I can forgive her for accepting you, but I should never have forgiven her if she had refused you—­if she had made my boy miserable.  And you have been miserable lately.  I have seen it for a long time.  I suppose it was all this coming on.”

He said it was.  The remembrance of other causes of irritation and moodiness had slipped entirely off his mind.

He stayed a long time with his mother, who pressed him to wait till his sister, who was shopping, returned.  But his sister tarried long out-of-doors, and at last the pain of Rachel’s absence returning on him, he left suddenly, promising to return in the evening.

He did not go back to his rooms.  He wandered aimlessly through the darkening streets, impatient of the slow hours.  At last he came out on the Embankment.  The sun was setting redly, frostily, in a gray world of sky-mist and river-mist and spectral bridge and spire.  A shaking path-way of pale flame came across the gray of the hidden river to meet him.

He stood a long time looking at it.  The low sun touched and forsook, touched and forsook point by point the little crowded world which it was leaving.

“My poor mother,” said Hugh to himself.  “Poor, gentle, loving soul whom I so nearly brought down with sorrow to the grave.  She will never know what an escape she has had.  I might have been more to her.  I might have made her happier, seeing her happiness is wrapped up in me.  I will make up to her for it.  I will be a better son to her in future.  Rachel and I together will make her last years happy.  Rachel and I together,” said Hugh, over and over again.

And then he suddenly remembered that though Rachel had taken herself away he could write to her, and—­he might look out the trains to Southminster.  He leaped into a hansom and hurried back to his rooms.

The porter met him in a mysterious manner in the entrance.  Lady waiting to see him.  Lady said she was his sister.  Had been waiting two hours.  In his rooms now.

Hugh laughed, and ran up the wide, common staircase.  His sister had heard the news from his mother and had rushed over at once.

As he stooped a little to fit the latch-key on his chain into the lock a man, who was coming down the stairs feeling in his pockets, stopped with a sudden exclamation.  It was Captain Pratt, pallid, smiling, hair newly varnished, resplendent in a magnificent fur overcoat.