she not quite naturally
put an unpleasant construction upon it? It was bad enough to have to
remember that they had parted in something like a tiff; he found it much
worse to be fancying the suspicions with which she would be turning over
his mysterious absence in her mind.

He went downstairs as speedily as possible and, discovering no overt
signs of breakfast in the vicinity of the restaurant, passed out and
made his way to the Embankment. This had been a favourite walk of his
in the old days--but he considered it now with an unsympathetic eye. It
seemed a dry and haggard and desolate-looking place by comparison with
his former impressions of it. The morning was grey-skied, but full of a
hard quality of light, which brought out to the uncompromising uttermost
the dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. The water was low, and
from the mud and ooze of the ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the
discoloured stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended his
unaccustomed nostril. A fitful, gusty wind was blowing from the east,
and ever and again it gathered dust in eddying swoops from the roadway,
and flung it in his face.

He walked on toward the City, without any conscious purpose, and with
no very definite reflections. It occurred to him that if his wife did
impute to him some unworthy motive in stealing off to London, and
made herself unhappy in doing so--that would at least provide the
compensation of showing that she cared. The thought, however, upon
examination, contained very meagre elements of solace. He could not in
the least be sure about any of the workings of her mind. There might be
more or less annoyance mixed up this morning with the secret thoughts
she had concerning him--or she might not be bothering her head about him
at all. This latter contingency had never presented itself so frankly to
him before. He looked hard at it, and saw more semblances of probability
about it than he liked. It might very well be that she was not thinking
about him one way or the other.

A depressing consciousness that practically nobody need think about him
pervaded his soul. Who cared what he said or did or felt? The City had
forgotten his very existence. In the West End, only here and there some
person might chance to remember his name as that of some rich bounder
who had married Lady Cressage. Nowhere else in England, save one dull
strip of agricultural blankness in a backward home county, was there
a human bei