He promised to give the clerk the
required notice; and having arranged everything in strictly legal manner,
hurried back to his cab, and directed the man to drive to the Lawn.
It was now three o'clock. At five he was to meet Dr. Jedd at the station.
He had two hours for his interview with Nancy Woolper, and his drive from
Bayswater to London Bridge.
He had tasted nothing since daybreak; but the necessity to eat and drink
never occurred to him. He was dimly conscious of feeling sick and faint,
but the reason of this sickness and faintness did not enter into his
thoughts. He took off his hat, and leant his head back against the
cushion of the hansom as that vehicle rattled across the squares of
Paddington. The summer day, the waving of green trees in those suburban
squares; the busy life and motion of the world through which he went,
mixed themselves into one jarring whirl of light and colour, noise and
motion. He found himself wondering how long it was since he left
Harold's Hill. Between the summer morning in which he had walked along
the dusty high-road, with fields of ripening corn upon his left, and all
the broad blue sea upon his right, and the summer afternoon in which he
drove in a jingling cab through the noisy streets and squares of
Bayswater, there seemed to him a gulf so wide, that his tried brain
shrank from scanning it.
He struggled with this feeling of helplessness and bewilderment, and
overcame it.
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