Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/204

. 17, 1861.]

else passed between the two women in that chamber of death needs not now be told.

The sisters returned to London.

“You will write to Paris to-night?” said Mrs. Hawkesley, and they were almost the only words which she had spoken to her sister.

“Yes, I will write,” said Laura, slowly, and as if the resolution was but half formed.

But it was needless, for, before the evening, Mr. Hawkesley arrived, with Arthur Lygon.

That evening Ernest Adair also met an acquaintance whom he had not expected to see again so soon—if ever.

He had lost no time in obeying the orders of M. Wolowski, had engaged a small room in one of the obscure streets between the Regent’s Park and the great thoroughfare which lies to the west, and giving the people of the house an impression that he was a theatrical artist, and that his visitors would be connected with some place of amusement—thereby taking a character which, if the owner be tolerably solvent, is exceedingly popular among the lower class of lodging-house keepers—Adair, too restless to remain at home, made his way, and it was a long one, to the eastern side of the city. There he lingered, tolerably certain to meet no friends in the strange, bustling population of that district. About the wide, old, squalid, yet prosperous quarter, Ernest Adair wandered, and sought to interest himself in its noisy and multifarious commerce, in its open-air banqueting, and in its frequent quarrels, which the large infusion of a sailor-constituency somewhat relieved from mere ruffianism, and rendered a matter of course, amid the revelling, fiddling, and unceremonious love-making with which our sea labourers beguile their leisure ashore. Adair had stopped, and been hemmed in by an unsavoury crowd that promptly gathered to behold a savage conflict between two fine-looking men who had, five minutes before, been affectionately forcing their money upon one another, but whom the demonstrative coquetry of a Cynthia of the minute had roused into jealous and vindictive rage. The fight was at its fiercest, and Adair was so far interested as to struggle for