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Page 57
A Zeppelin warning, a few hours before, had driven the people to
their homes. There was not a chink of light to be seen anywhere.
An intense and gloomy stillness seemed to brood over the deserted
thoroughfares. Nightbirds on their way home flitted by like
shadows. Policemen lurked in the shadows of the houses. The few
vehicles left crawled about with insufficient lights. Even the
warning horns of the taxicab men sounded furtive and repressed.
Lessingham, as he marched stolidly along, felt curiously in
sympathy with his environment. Hayter's news brought him face to
face with that inner problem which had so suddenly become the
dominant factor in his life. For the first time he knew what love
was. He felt the wonder of it, the far-reaching possibilities,
the strange idealism called so unexpectedly into being. He
recognized the vagaries of Philippa's disposition, and yet,
during the last few days, he had convinced himself that she was
beginning to care. Her strained relations with her husband had
been, without a doubt, her first incentive towards the acceptance
of his proffered devotion. Now he told himself with eager
hopefulness that some portion of it, however minute, must be for
his own sake. The relations between husband and wife, he reminded
himself, must, at any rate, have been strained during the last
few months, or Cranston would never have been able to keep his
secret. In his gloomy passage through this land of ill omens,
however, he shivered a little as he thought of the other
possibility--tortured himself with imagining what might happen
during her revulsion of feeling, if Philippa discovered the truth.
A sense of something greater than he had yet known in life seemed
to lift him into some lofty state of aloofness, from which he
could look down and despise himself, the poor, tired plodder
wearing the heavy chains of duty. There was a life so much more
wonderful, just the other side of the clouds, a very short distance
away, a life of alluring and passionate happiness. Should he ever
find the courage, he wondered, to escape from the treadmill and
go in search of it? Duty, for the last two years, had taken him
by the hand and led him along a pathway of shame. He had never
been a hypocrite about the war. He was one of those who had
acknowledged from the first that Germany had set forth, with the
sword in her hand, on a war of conquest. His own inherited
martial spirit had vaguely approved; he, too, in those earlier
days, had felt the sunlight upon his rapier. Later had come the
enlightenment, the turbulent waves of doubt, the nightmare of a
nation's awakening conscience, mirrored in his own soul. It was
in a depression shared, perhaps, in a lesser degree by millions
of those whose ranks he had joined, that he felt this passionate
craving for escape into a world which took count of other things.
CHAPTER XVII
Punctually at 12 o'clock the next morning, Lessingham presented
himself at the hotel in Dover Street and was invited by the hall
porter to take a seat in the lounge. Philippa entered, a few
minutes later, her eyes and cheeks brilliant with the brisk exercise
she had been taking, her slim figure most becomingly arrayed in
grey cloth and chinchilla.
"I lost Helen in Harrod's," she announced, "but I know she's
lunching with friends, so it really doesn't matter. You'll have
to take care of me, Mr. Lessingham, until the train goes, if you
will."
"For even longer than that, if you will," he murmured.
She laughed. "More pretty speeches? I don't think I'm equal to
them before luncheon."
"This time I am literal," he explained. "I am coming back to
Dreymarsh myself."
He felt his heart beat quicker, a sudden joy possessed him.
Philippa's expression was obviously one of satisfaction.
"I'm so glad," she assured him. "Do you know, I was thinking only
as I came back in the taxicab, how I should miss you."
She was standing with her foot upon the broad fender, and her first
little impulse of pleasure seemed to pass as she looked into the
fire. She turned towards him gravely.
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