“I am going to her,” said Edward.

“Do not.”

“There’s an end of talking.  I trust no one will come in my path.  Where am I?”

He looked up at the name of the street, and shot away from her.  Rhoda departed in another direction, firm, since she had seen Sedgett pass, that his nobleness should not meet with an ill reward.  She endowed him with fair moral qualities, which she contrasted against Edward Blancove’s evil ones; and it was with a democratic fervour of contempt that she dismissed the superior outward attractions of the gentleman.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

This neighbourhood was unknown to Edward, and, after plunging about in one direction and another, he found that he had missed his way.  Down innumerable dusky streets of dwarfed houses, showing soiled silent window-blinds, he hurried and chafed; at one moment in sharp joy that he had got a resolution, and the next dismayed by the singular petty impediments which were tripping him.  “My dearest!” his heart cried to Dahlia, “did I wrong you so?  I will make all well.  It was the work of a fiend.”  Now he turned to right, now to left, and the minutes flew.  They flew; and in the gathering heat of his brain he magnified things until the sacrifice of herself Dahlia was preparing for smote his imagination as with a blaze of the upper light, and stood sublime before him in the grandeur of old tragedy.  “She has blinded her eyes, stifled her senses, eaten her heart.  Oh! my beloved! my wife! my poor girl! and all to be free from shame in her father’s sight!” Who could have believed that a girl of Dahlia’s class would at once have felt the shame so keenly, and risen to such pure heights of heroism?  The sacrifice flouted conception; it mocked the steady morning.  He refused to believe in it, but the short throbs of his blood were wiser.

A whistling urchin became his guide.  The little lad was carelessly giving note to a popular opera tune, with happy disregard of concord.  It chanced that the tune was one which had taken Dahlia’s ear, and, remembering it and her pretty humming of it in the old days, Edward’s wrestling unbelief with the fatality of the hour sank, so entirely was he under the sovereignty of his sensations.  He gave the boy a big fee, desiring superstitiously to feel that one human creature could bless the hour.  The house was in view.  He knocked, and there came a strange murmur of some denial.  “She is here,” he said, menacingly.

“She was taken away, sir, ten minutes gone, by a gentleman,” the servant tied to assure him.

The landlady of the house, coming up the kitchen stairs, confirmed the statement.  In pity for his torpid incredulity she begged him to examine her house from top to bottom, and herself conducted him to Dahlia’s room.

“That bed has not been slept in,” said the lawyer, pointing his finger to it.

“No, sir; poor thing! she didn’t sleep last night.  She’s been wearying for weeks; and last night her sister came, and they hadn’t met for very long.  Two whole candles they burnt out, or near upon it.”