“It is your imagination that is excited. How could you see at that distance, much less hear?”
“I thought,” said Charlotte solemnly, “that she said, ‘Too late, too late!’ I know I could not hear. Do not find fault with me. I am very unhappy. There! there! you can see her now?”
Somebody in a cloak indeed disappeared in the crowd as I looked out, but who it was, how could I tell? Perhaps a workwoman going to her work, or careful manager out to make her market. I took Charlotte’s hand, which was trembling, and held it in mine. She was sobbing under her breath. “All this is too much for you,” I said. “Find fault with you? Oh that I could take this trouble on my own shoulders, whatever it is!”
She tried to smile as she looked up. “Perhaps,” she said, “it was imagination, as you say. What is imagination? Does it make any difference?” She was not aware how much meaning was in her words, but spoke as one bewildered, not knowing what was real and what unreal about her.
It was about eleven o’clock when they set out. I put Mr. Campbell into a cab, where he sat very square, with his staff between his knees, leaning upon it, and his face like that of a benignant old judge, wound up to make a painful decision. Charlotte took her place beside him. For my own part, I sprang into a hansom, and desired the man to follow. It seemed impossible to predict what might happen. I had begun to be superstitious and fanciful myself, and a dozen times over fancied that I saw a woman in a cloak following our course with wistful looks, or shaking her head, as Charlotte had seen her. Had she seen it, or only imagined it? And if the latter, I asked myself in her own words, What difference did it make?
Colin’s lodgings proved to be in the last place to which I should have thought him likely to have gone--in one of the prim, respectable, old-fashioned streets about Bloomsbury. Probably he felt himself more out of the way of remark there than he would have been in regions more under public inspection, and where acquaintances might have found him more readily. I got out quickly to hand Mr. Campbell from the cab, and he held fast to my arm, apparently with a little confusion of mind. “Yes, I want your arm. I am--a little shaky this morning; don’t leave me, Charley!” he said. “Father, it is Mr. Temple,” said Charlotte. He looked up at me with dim eyes, and a half smile. “Ay, to be sure, it is Mr. Temple. Never mind, he will just come with me all the same.” He had been so determined before not to acknowledge to me any anxiety about Colin, that this sudden abandonment of all reticence struck me with strange surprise. I exchanged a glance with Charlotte over his shoulder. “Will you come, since he says so?” she said. I could not blame her for not wishing for my presence, but I felt by the weight of his hand upon my arm that I was necessary, and said nothing more.