Looking
back, Mostyn saw that Marie was lingering at the gate. He knew from
the regretful look in her face that she was deploring the incident;
but, simply raising his hat again, he strode on.
All the remainder of the morning he worked at his desk. He tried to
make himself feel that, now that Marie was leaving, his future would
be less clouded; but with all the effort made, he could not shake off
a certain clinging sense of approaching disaster. Was he afraid that
Buckton would gossip about what he had just seen, and that the public
would brand him afresh with the discarded habits of the past? He could
not have answered the question. He was sure of nothing. He lunched at
his club, smoked a dismal cigar with Delbridge and some other men, and
heard them chatting about the rise and fall of stocks as if they and
he were in a turbulent dream. They appeared as marvels to him in their
unstumbling blindness under the overbrooding horrors of life, in their
ignorance of the dark, psychic current against which he alone was
battling.
All the afternoon he toiled at the bank, and at dusk he walked home.
No one was about the front of the house, and he went up to his room.
He had bathed his face and hands, changed his suit, and was about to
descend the stairs when his father-in-law came tottering along the
corridor and paused at the open door of the room.
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