Yes. And Mrs. Woolper and Miss Paget?"
"They went a'most directly after you was gone out, sir. There was two
cabs to take Miss Halliday's and Mrs. Sheldon's things, and such
like,--just as there was when you came from Harold's Hill."
"Yes; I understand."
He was half inclined to ask the young woman if she had heard the
direction given to the drivers of these two cabs. But he refrained from
doing so. What could it profit him to know where his wife and
stepdaughter were to be found? Whether they were in the next street or at
the antipodes could matter very little to him, except so far as the
knowledge of their place of habitation might guide him in his avoidance
of them. Between him and them there was a gulf wider than all the waters
of the world, and to consider them was only foolish waste of time and
thought. He left the house, which for the last five years of his life had
been the outward and visible sign of his social status, fully conscious
that he left it for ever; and he left it without a sigh. For him the word
home had no tender associations, and the domestic hearth had never
inspired him with any sense of comfort or pleasure with which he might
not have been inspired by the luxurious fireside of a first-class
coffee-room. He was a man who would have chosen to spend his existence in
joint-stock hotels, if there had not been solidity of position to be
acquired from the possession of a handsome house.
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