‘LUKE ACKROYD.’

He addressed this to Lydia, ‘Miss Lydia Trent,’ that there might be no mistake, and went out to post it.  But at the letter-box he altered his intention.  If it was delivered by the postman, Thyrza would see it; it would lead to questionings.

He determined to deliver it at the hat factory in the morning, with his own hand.

CHAPTER XXII

GOOD-BYE

Left alone, after Thyrza’s second visit to him in the library, Egremont had no mind to continue his task.  He idled about for a while, read half a page in a volume he took out of the box at hazard, then put on his overcoat and went out by the front door, which he locked behind him with the key he carried for his own convenience.

He was wishing that he had not fallen into this piece of folly.  As long as no one but Grail and himself was concerned, it mattered nothing; to have established a secret intercourse with Thyrza was a result of his freak for which he was not at all prepared.  And he could not see his way out of the difficulty.  He might go and see Grail, and let him know what he was doing, but that would involve deliberate concealment of Thyrza’s visits.  He could not speak of them; he had no right to do so.  If Thyrza on her part told all about it—­why, that would make it, for him, still more unpleasant.  And Thyrza was not likely to do that; he felt assured of it.  Precisely; that meant that henceforth there would be a secret understanding between himself and Gilbert’s wife.  Most certainly he desired nothing of the kind.

A weak way of putting it.  Walter dreaded anything of the kind.  Two days—­Monday, Tuesday—­and in that brief time the whole face of the future had changed for him.  On Sunday evening he had sat thinking over his future relations with Grail and Thyrza.  The fact that he consciously brought himself to reflect upon the subject of course proved that it involved certain doubts and difficulties for him, but in half an hour he believed that he had put his mind in order.  Thyrza interested him—­why not say it out, as he was bent on understanding himself?  She interested him more vitally than any girl he had ever known.  Very possibly he saw her in the light of illusion; should his opportunities grant him a completer knowledge of her, he might not improbably discover that after all she was but a pretty girl of the people, attractive in a great measure owing to her very deficiencies.  He would very likely come to laugh at himself for having thought that her value was above that of Annabel Newthorpe.  But he had to deal with the present, and in the present Thyrza seemed to him all gold.  Had there existed no Gilbert Grail, he would have been in love with Thyrza.

The plain truth.  But Gilbert Grail did exist, and in Walter Egremont existed a sense of honour, a sense of shame.  Should he by word or deed throw light upon Gilbert Grail’s future, he felt that all the good of his own life would be at an end.  He could not face man or woman again.