Chapter 24

Von Hillern made no further calls on Mrs. Gareth-Lawless. His return
to Berlin was immediate and Fraulein Hirsch came no more to give
lessons in German. Later, Coombe learned from the mam with the
steady, blunt-featured face, that she had crossed the Channel on
a night boat not many hours after Von Hillern had walked away from
Berford Place. The exact truth was that she had been miserably
prowling about the adjacent streets, held in the neighbourhood
by some self-torturing morbidness, half thwarted helpless passion,
half triumphing hatred of the young thing she had betrayed. Up
and down the streets she had gone, round and round, wringing her
lean fingers together and tasting on her lips the salt of tears
which rolled down her cheeks--tears of torment and rage.

There was the bitterness of death in what, by a mere trick of
chance, came about. As she turned a corner telling herself for
the hundredth time that she must go home, she found herself face
to face with a splendid figure swinging furiously along. She
staggered at the sight of the tigerish rage in the white face she
recognized with a gasp. It was enough merely to behold it. He had
met with some disastrous humiliation!

As for him, the direct intervention of that Heaven whose special
care he was, had sent him a woman to punish--which, so far, was at
least one thing arranged as it should be. He knew so well how he
could punish her with his mere contempt and displeasure--as he
could lash a spaniel crawling at his feet. He need not deign to
tell her what had happened, and he did not. He merely drew back
and stood in stiff magnificence looking down at her.

"It is through some folly of yours," he dropped in a voice of
vitriol. "Women are always foolish. They cannot hold their tongues
or think clearly. Return to Berlin at once. You are not of those
whose conduct I can commend to be trusted in the future."

He was gone before she could have spoken even if she had dared.
Sobbing gasps caught her breath as she stood and watched him
striding pitilessly and superbly away with, what seemed to her
abject soul, the swing and tread of a martial god. Her streaming
tears tasted salt indeed. She might never see him again--even from
a distance. She would be disgraced and flung aside as a blundering
woman. She had obeyed his every word and done her straining best,
as she had licked the dust at his feet--but he would never cast a
glance at her in the future or utter to her the remotest word of
his high commands. She so reeled as she went her wretched way that
a good-natured policeman said to her as he passed,

"Steady on, my girl. Best get home and go to bed."

To Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, it was stated by Coombe