“Oh, what will Gerda do?” he cried. “Christ! she’ll be so vexed!” Blankly and irritably he looked at Christie; and in that expression of confused dismay there was⁠—and he knew well enough there was⁠—a faint tinge of reproach. But the girl was apparently too tired to notice this.

He was unable to catch the faintest irony upon her anxious, sympathetic face, as she let him out by the little side-door into the street. It did occur to him, however, as he strode rapidly down the echoing High Street, to wonder a little uneasily what kind of expression her face would wear when, alone in her bedroom, she looked at herself in her mirror. It was not, all the same, till he was opposite Mrs. Herbert’s darkened house that the full poignancy of one of her remarks hit him with its barbed arrowhead. “I wonder if that will be her destiny,” he thought.