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He could not keep out of it longer, as all his brother officers had volunteered, so he had felt obliged to do so, too. They were to start in less than three weeks. "I shall go by the ten-o'clock train," I told McGreggor, as I scribbled my reply. "I must get up at once. Ask for my breakfast to be brought up here." I was dressed by nine o'clock and sipping my chocolate.
They did not answer, but they did not seem surprised, nor were they in the least shy. I asked the man if they were his children. "Mine! oh no! they are the sons of Glengyle the Laird of Glengyle, he who lives at the upper end of the lake yonder McGreggor, that is, the McGreggor, the chief of the McGreggor clan." Rob Roy and his wife and children rose up before my imagination.
"Comtesse!" he began, when McGreggor knocked at the door. "Mr. Gurrage is calling you, ma'am," she said, in her heavy, Scotch voice, "and he seems in a hurry, ma'am." "Ambrosine!" echoed impatiently in the hall. "Why, it must be dressing-time!" said Antony, calmly, looking at his watch. "I must not keep you," and he quietly left the room as Augustus burst in from my bedroom door.
I could not say, as I felt, "But that is the one thing I should like you to do," so I said nothing, and, as soon as I could get near the bell unperceived, rang for McGreggor again, and put an end to the scene. Next morning at breakfast Augustus said: "As Farrington has refused for the 15th, you had better write and ask that fellow Thornhirst your cousin.
I hoped it was not one of the fat German Jews who had followed me once or twice. Ugly creatures! hardly human, they seemed to me. I wished I had Roy with me. He had gone with McGreggor into the town. A bend in the path hid the person from view until we met face to face. And then I saw it was Antony, and it seemed as if my heart stopped beating.
There was time enough for our meeting. I would not push fate I, who had been a widow only two months. The only thing there seemed for me to do was to start for America immediately, and, after taking paid advice one gets very good advice by paying for it Roy, McGreggor, my lawyer, and I left England one cold and bleak March morning.
This was not the moment for recriminations. Augustus noticed it, and, as usual, began to bluster. "What's up?" he asked, irritably. "You look as white as a ghost." "I will get into the carriage," I said, "I am cold." And Atkinson and McGreggor arranged my cushion and rugs for me, Augustus uneasily watching the platform meanwhile.
He seemed to have forgotten the scene of the morning, and was in a most amiable mood. He had brought me a new muff chain, in wonderfully good taste; he could never have chosen it himself. It is so difficult to thank people for things when you would like to throw them in the fire rather than receive them. However, I did my best. McGreggor felt it her duty to leave the room.
I breakfasted and lunched and dined and walked miles every day. I loathed my food. I hated the faces of the people who stared at me. I fear I even snapped at McGreggor. Roy was my only comfort. But gradually the beauty and peace of the pine-forests soothed me. Better thoughts came. I said to myself: "Enough. Now you will go home and face life.
I could not speak to him, as McGreggor was in the room, and afterwards it seemed too late. Should I leave the affair in silence? Oh, if I had some one to advise me! Lady Tilchester, perhaps. And yet how, so soon after my marriage, could I say to her: "My husband pays for another woman's clothes, and is, I suppose, her lover.
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