And yet actually, in spite of the extreme physical weariness which had gradually stolen over him, dulling his senses, so that he was hardly conscious of Oswyn’s departure, or of the subdued entrance of the nurse, who had been discreetly waiting for it, Rainham’s mind was still keenly vigilant; and it was in the relief of a certain new lucidity, an almost hieratic calm, that he reviewed that recent interview, in which he had so deliberately unburdened himself.  It seemed as if, in his great weakness, the ache of his old desire, his fever of longing, bad suddenly left him, giving place (as though the literal wasting away of his body had really given freer access to that pure spirit, its prisoner), to a love now altogether purged of passion, and become strangely tolerable and sweet.

CHAPTER XXX

If Philip Rainham’s name, during that long, hard winter and ungracious spring—­near the close of which he turned his face, with the least little sigh of regret, to the wall—­was not often mentioned in the house in Parton Street, at whose door he had formerly knocked so often, it must not be supposed that by its occupants it had been in any way forgotten.  He had not committed the discourtesy of leaving Lady Garnett’s note unanswered; on the contrary, he had answered it both promptly and—­as it seemed to him—­well, in a letter which was certainly diplomatic, suggesting as it did—­at least, to Mary Masters, to whom it had been shown—­that he was on the point of an immediate flight South.

Whether the elder lady was equally deceived by his ambiguous phrases, it was not so easy to declare.  She had, at this time less than ever, the mode of persons who wear their hearts upon their sleeves; her mask of half-cynical good-humour was constantly up; and she met the girl’s hinted interrogations—­for directly the nature of their uneasiness, by a sort of tacit agreement, was not alluded to—­with the same smiling indifference, the same air of bland reassurance which she brought to the discussion of a sauce or an entremet at one of those select little dinner-parties on which she piqued herself, and which latterly had been more incessant and more select than ever.

Only on Mary’s sensitive ear something in the elaborately cheerful tone in which she mentioned their vanished friend would occasionally jar.  It was too perfectly well done not to appear a little exaggerated; and though she could force a smile at Lady Garnett’s persistent picture of the recalcitrant godson basking, with his pretext of ill-health, on the sunny terraces of Monte Carlo, she none the less cherished a suspicion that the picture was as little convincing to its author as to herself, that her aunt also had silent moments in which she credited the more depressing theory.

And the long silence simply deepened her conviction that, all the time they were imposing upon themselves with such vain conjectures, he was actually within their reach, sick and sorry and alone, in that terrible Blackpool, which she peopled, in her imagination of a young lady whose eastward wanderings had never extended beyond a flower show in the Temple Gardens, with a host of vague, inconceivable horrors.