Part 32 (2/2)
”Oh, I couldn't sit opposite my friend at dinner, I couldn't meet his eyes now, my dear child”
The duchess touched his ar as I ae beyond you
Please stay”
The pleasure which his visits had been to her had brought so of an animation and interest to her cold face Dressed in a dark and siown, her fur stole about her neck, she had this afternoon followed hi by his side towards the gate
”Of all the people in the world one would choose you, I think, to be the friend of” She caught herself up ”I et those stupid little ideas of honor and friendshi+p and all that?”
She put it beautifully ”I, of course, will give up seeing you,” she renounced, ”but it will be a world of comfort just to feel that you are there”
As he did not at once succumb to her blandishments, she asked point blank:
”Proo without letting you know of it”
”Without my permission?”
”I won't say that”
”But I'm sure that you mean it,” she nodded happily, ”and you're _such_ a help”
She was so affectionate as she bade hiin to wonder just what help he was Was he aiding her to detective poor Westboro'? Was he adding an air of protection to some feminine treachery?
”Oh, no,” he decided; ”she's incapable of any thing of the sort But I must clear out;” and he decided that at once, so soon as Westboro'
should be at horound still more neutral than The Dials had proved to be But Westboro' showed no intention of cooism, as if the fact that he had ave hiht to the other's time even in absence, he laid a firm hold on Jimmy Westboro' finally put pen to paper, and the scrappy letter touched the deserted visitor; it proved to have been written at a _bureau de poste_ in Paris:
”Don't, for God's sake, go off, old man Keep up your end” (His end!) ”Stop on at Westboro'--Use the place as if it were all put up for your amusement Just live there so Iat home when I turn up I'll wire in a day or so”
”So he is in Paris, then” Bulstrode had supposed so, and did not doubt that the Duke had gone there to find news of his wife, possibly as well to see Mada for the duchess! Well, Bulstrode would keep up his end, he had nothing else for the ti to do but to mind other people's business He put it so to himself Indeed he could not but believe it was fortunate forcould keep hi his own
An undefined discretion kept hie, as to himself he styled the retreat the duchess had iven his out” as he called the lamentably His own affairs, which he so faithlessly denied, came to him in batches of letters whose questions could not be solved by return hts restless, and he sent a telegras here yourself Can't possibly stop on longer than”
And he set a day
”If Westboro', poor devil, has to look forward to a life of this unaccorandeur,” he pitied him The lines and files of soft-footed, impersonal servants, the perfect stilted attention, the silence, and the inhumanness of a man's lonely life, becah Frances, duchess of Westboro', had truly said that the castle was a delightful hoan to wonder what that word co like his occupation of another man's house or like any life that is lived alone
At the end of the week that the American spent at Westboro' he had condensed the castle, as he said to himself, as far as possible, to the proportions of a Harlem flat, and he lived in it In the alave on the terrace, and where all the December sun that was visible came to find him, he took his meals; each of them but dinner, which was deter-rooms, and at which function, as he expressed it, he shut his eyes and just ate blindly through He lived out of doors all day, took his tea in his dressing-rooust dinner hour called him down to dress and dine alone For a week he lived ”without sight of a hu,” so he said, for the domestics were only one to see any one: an enee was, of course, the duchess of Westboro'
Westboro' had made a confidant of Bulstrode, and the woman had not
Bulstrode liked it in her To be sure, the cases were quite different: there was no reason why the man deserted and bruised in his pride and in his heart, should not have talked to his old friend Westboro'
accused himself of weakness
”I've blabbed like a woed ruefully