John Hanbury had from his first thinking of Dora more than of any other girl he had met, looked on her as a possible wife. When he went further and made up his mind to ask her to marry him, he had regarded her as a future wife more than a present sweetheart. He had felt that she would be a credit and an ornament to him and that they should get on well together. He had never for an hour been carried away by his feelings towards her. He had never lost his head. He told himself he had lost his heart, because he was more happy in her society than in the society of any other young woman he had met.
He was an imaginative man, of good education, strong impulse, and skilful in the use of words. Yet he had not addressed a single piece of verse to her. She had not moved him to adopt that unfamiliar form of expression. He had nothing in his mind about her that he could not express in prose. This alone was a suspicious circumstance. He knew he was not a poet, and he felt it would be absurd to try to be a poet, because he was going to marry a woman he liked very much.
This was ample evidence she had not touched the inner springs of love in him. The young man who keeps his reason always about him, and won't make a fool of himself for the woman he wants to marry, isn't in love at all. There may be fifty words describing beautifully the excellence of his intentions towards the young woman, but love is not one of those words. He had felt all along that they were about to enter into a delicious partnership; not that he was going to drink the wine of a heavenly dream.
This morning he was wrestling and groaning in spirit when the servant brought the letters to his door. He recognised her writing at once, and tore the envelope open hastily.
He read the letter slowly and with decaying spirit. When he had finished he folded it up deliberately and put it back into the envelope. His face was pale, his lips were apart, his eyes dull, expressionless.
"Be it so," he said at length. "She is right," he added bitterly. "She is always right. She would always be right, and I when I differed from her always wrong. That is not the position a husband should occupy in a wife's esteem."
Then he sat down in the easy chair he had occupied two nights before, and fell into a reverie. He did not heed how time went. When he roused himself he learned that his mother had gone out. He did not want to meet her now. He did not want to meet anyone. He wished to be alone with his thoughts. Where can man be more alone than in the streets of a great city?
He went out with no definite object except to be free of interruption. His mind ran on Dora. Now he thought of her with anger, now with affection, now with sorrow. He had no thought of trying to undo her resolve. He acquiesced in it. He was glad it came from her and not from him.
Now that all was over between them, and they were by-and-by to be good friends, and no more, he became sentimental.
He passed in review the pleasant hours they had spent together. He took a melancholy delight in conjuring up the things they had said, the places they had gone to, the balls, and theatres, and galleries and meetings they had been at with one another. He thought of the last walk they took, the walk which led to the present breach between them. It was in this neighbourhood somewhere. Ah, he remembered. He would go and see the place once more.
Once more! Why it was only two days since they had come this way, she leaning on his arm. What a wonderful lot of things had been crowded into those two days!
This was the street. What was the meaning of the crowd? When she and he were here last, there had been a crowd too. Was there always a crowd here? By Jove! there had been a fire. And, by Jove! the house burned was the one against the end wall of which she and he had stood to watch the nigger.
Policemen were keeping people back from the front of Forbes's bakery, which was completely gutted, standing a mere shell, with its bare, roofless walls open
to the light of Heaven. All the floors had fallen, and a fireman with a hose was playing on the smoking rubbish within.
"An unlucky place," thought Hanbury, as he stood to look at the ruins. "First that unfortunate nigger meets with an accident there, and now this house is burned quite out. An unlucky corner."
At that moment there was a cry of dismay from the crowd. Hanbury drew back. He thought the walls were falling. Presently the cry of dismay changed to a cheer, and the crowd at the corner of the Hanover swayed and opened, and through it, from a cab which had just drawn up, walked hastily towards the smoking pile, Oscar Leigh.
Where Hanbury stood was the nearest point from which the dwarf could command a view of the bakery. When he reached Hanbury's side, he stopped, looked up, dropped his stick, flung his hands aloft and uttered an awful yell of despair.
The people drew back from him.
No trace of even the floor of the clock-room remained in position, beyond a few charred fragments of joists. Everything was gone, wheels and pulleys, and levers, and shafts, and chains, and drums, and bands. Even the very frame itself, with its four strong pillars and thick cross-bars, left not a trace aloft, and its very position was not indicated in the heap of steaming rubbish.