As they dashed through Ludgate Hill, Fleet street,
and the Strand, in a fast hansom, George Talboys poured
into his friend’s ear all those wild hopes and
dreams which had usurped such a dominion over his sanguine
nature.
“I shall take a villa on the banks of the Thames,
Bob,” he said, “for the little wife and
myself; and we’ll have a yacht, Bob, old boy,
and you shall lie on the deck and smoke, while my
pretty one plays her guitar and sings songs to us.
She’s for all the world like one of those what’s-its-names,
who got poor old Ulysses into trouble,” added
the young man, whose classic lore was not very great.
The waiters at the Westminster coffee-house stared
at the hollow-eyed, unshaven stranger, with his clothes
of colonial cut, and his boisterous, excited manner;
but he had been an old frequenter of the place in his
military days, and when they heard who he was they
flew to do his bidding.
He did not want much—only a bottle of soda-water,
and to know if there was a letter at the bar directed
to George Talboys.
The waiter brought the soda-water before the young
men had seated themselves in a shady box near the
disused fire-place. No; there was no letter for
that name.
The waiter said it with consummate indifference, while
he mechanically dusted the little mahogany table.
George’s face blanched to a deadly whiteness.
“Talboys,” he said; “perhaps you
didn’t hear the name distinctly—T,
A, L, B, O, Y, S. Go and look again, there must
be a letter.”
The waiter shrugged his shoulders as he left the room,
and returned in three minutes to say that there was
no name at all resembling Talboys in the letter rack.
There was Brown, and Sanderson, and Pinchbeck; only
three letters altogether.
The young man drank his soda-water in silence, and
then, leaning his elbows on the table, covered his
face with his hands. There was something in his
manner which told Robert Audley that his disappointment,
trifling as it may appear, was in reality a very bitter
one. He seated himself opposite to his friend,
but did not attempt to address him.
By-and-by George looked up, and mechanically taking
a greasy Times newspaper of the day before
from a heap of journals on the table, stared vacantly
at the first page.
I cannot tell how long he sat blankly staring at one
paragraph among the list of deaths, before his dazed
brain took in its full meaning; but after considerable
pause he pushed the newspaper over to Robert Audley,
and with a face that had changed from its dark bronze
to a sickly, chalky grayish white, and with an awful
calmness in his manner, he pointed with his finger
to a line which ran thus:
“On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight,
Helen Talboys, aged 22.”
THE HEADSTONE AT VENTNOR.
Yes, there it was in black and white—“Helen
Talboys, aged 22.”
