“Ah, yes, go!” she said, after a while, answering Rainham’s exclamation.  “For pity’s sake, go!”

Rainham bowed his head, obeyed her; as the door closed behind them he could hear that she cried softly, and that Lightmark, his silence at last broken, consoled her with inaudible words.

CHAPTER XXIV

Rainham turned at random out of Grove Road, walking aimlessly, and very fast, without considering direction.  He had passed the girl’s arm through his own as they left the house; and in a sort of stupefied obedience she had submitted.  To her, too, one way was the same as another, as dreary and as vain.  With Rainham, indeed, after the tension of the last few minutes, into which he had crowded such a wealth of suffering and of illumination, a curious stupor had succeeded.  For the moment he neither thought nor suffered:  simply, it was good to be out there, in the darkness—­the darkness of London—­after that immense plunge, which was still too near him, that he should attempt to appreciate it in all its relations.  By-and-by would be the season of reckoning, the just and delicate analysis, by nicely critical nature, of all that he had deliberately lost, when he might run desperately before the whips of his own thought; now he felt only the lethargy which succeeds strenuous action, that has been, in a measure, victorious; the physical well-being of walking rapidly, vaguely, through the comfortable shadows, allowing the cold rain to pelt refreshingly upon his face and aching temples.  And it was not until they had gone so through several streets, whose names were a blank to him, that Rainham bethought him, with a touch of self-reproach, of his companion, and how ill her thin garments and slender figure were calculated to suffer the downpour, which he only found consoling.  He drew her into the shelter of a doorway, signalled to a passing cab; and just then, the light of an adjacent street lamp falling upon her face, he realized for the first time in its sunken outline the progress of her malady.

“I beg your pardon,” he said gently; “I did not understand that you were ill.  You must tell me where you are lodging, and I will take you back.”  Then, as though he anticipated her hesitation, a tribute to her old ambiguity, become so useless, he added dryly:  “You can tell me your address; you have no reason to hide yourself now.”

She glanced up at him furtively, shrinking back a little as though she feared his irony.

“I live in Charlotte Street, No. —.  But pray let me go alone, sir!  It will not be your way.”

“I have rooms in Bloomsbury,” he answered.  “It will be entirely on my way.”

And the girl made no further protest, when he handed her into the cab, an inconvenient four-wheeler which had responded to his signal, and, after giving the driver the address which she had indicated, took his place silently beside her.  Perhaps something of Rainham’s own lethargy had infected her, after a scene so feverish; or perhaps she could not but feel dimly, and in a manner not to be analysed, how that, distant and apart as they two seemed, yet within the last hour, by Rainham’s action, between her life and his a subtile, invisible chord had been stretched, so that the order of her going might well rest with him.