He was dressed in the deepest mourning, and on his bowler was a
broad black band. He had even a black border to his handkerchief.
His garb of woe suggested that he had lost in one
catastrophe every relation he had in the world, even to
cousins by marriage twice removed. His plumpness and his red,
fat cheeks made his mourning not a little incongruous. It was
cruel that his extreme unhappiness should have in it something
of buffoonery.
He told me he had made up his mind to go away, though not to
Italy, as I had suggested, but to Holland.
"I'm starting to-morrow. This is perhaps the last time we
shall ever meet."
I made an appropriate rejoinder, and he smiled wanly.
"I haven't been home for five years. I think I'd forgotten it all;
I seemed to have come so far away from my father's house
that I was shy at the idea of revisiting it; but now I feel
it's my only refuge."
He was sore and bruised, and his thoughts went back to the
tenderness of his mother's love. The ridicule he had endured
for years seemed now to weigh him down, and the final blow of
Blanche's treachery had robbed him of the resiliency which had
made him take it so gaily.
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