Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts.  His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.  He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the tumble-down house, and the oak-grove under which the dusk was gathering.  It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to have found Madame Olenska; and she was far away, and even the pink sunshade was not hers . . .

He frowned and hesitated.  “You don’t know, I suppose—­ I shall be in Boston tomorrow.  If I could manage to see her—­”

He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile persisted.  “Oh, of course; how lovely of you!  She’s staying at the Parker House; it must be horrible there in this weather.”

After that Archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they exchanged.  He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that he should await the returning family and have high tea with them before he drove home.  At length, with his hostess still at his side, he passed out of range of the wooden Cupid, unfastened his horses and drove off.  At the turn of the lane he saw Miss Blenker standing at the gate and waving the pink parasol.

XXIII.

The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall River train, he emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston.  The streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the bathroom.

Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast.  Even the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no excess of heat ever degrades the European cities.  Care-takers in calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy, and the Common looked like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic.  If Archer had tried to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.

He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning with a slice of melon, and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and scrambled eggs.  A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had business in Boston, and should take the Fall River boat that night and go on to New York the following evening.  It had always been understood that he would return to town early in the week, and when he got back from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter from the office, which fate had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to justify his sudden change of plan.  He was even ashamed of the ease with which the whole thing had been done:  it reminded him, for an uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence Lefferts’s masterly contrivances for securing his freedom.  But this did not long trouble him, for he was not in an analytic mood.