Aurora Floyd (Feminist Classic). Mary Elizabeth Braddon

and dropped it into the man’s hand.

      “Nothing wrong at Bulstrode, I hope, sir?” said the servant. “Is Sir John ill?”

      “No, no; I’ve had a letter from my mother — I— you’ll find me at the Great Western.”

      He snatched up his hat, and was hurrying from the room; but the man followed him with his great-coat.

      “You’ll catch your death, sir, on such a night as this,” the servant said, in a tone of respectful remonstrance.

      The banker was standing at the door of the dining-room when Talbot crossed the hall. He was telling a servant to look for his daughter.

      “We are all waiting for Miss Floyd,” the old man said; “we can not begin dinner without Miss Floyd.”

      Unobserved in the confusion, Talbot opened the great door softly, and let himself out into the cold winter’s night. The long terrace was all ablaze with the lights in the high, narrow windows, as upon the night when he had first come to Felden; and before him lay the park, the trees bare and leafless, the ground white with a thin coating of snow, the sky above gray and starless — a cold and desolate expanse, in dreary contrast with the warmth and brightness behind. All this was typical of the crisis of his life. He was leaving warm love and hope for cold resignation or icy despair. He went down the terrace-steps, across the trim garden-walks, and out into that wide, mysterious park. The long avenue was ghostly in the gray light, the tracery of the interlacing branches above his head making black shadows, that flickered to and fro upon the whitened ground beneath his feet. He walked for a quarter of a mile before he looked back at the lighted windows behind him. He did not turn until a wind in the avenue had brought him to a spot from which he could see the dimly-lighted bay-window of the room in which he had left Aurora. He stood for some time looking at this feeble glimmer, and thinking — thinking of all he had lost, or all he had perhaps escaped — thinking of what his life was to be henceforth without that woman — thinking that he would rather have been the poorest ploughboy in Beckenham parish than the heir of Bulstrode, if he could have taken the girl he loved to his heart, and believed in her truth.