Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/41
don, “You'll soon be out of that chair, and then you can put your impulse to the test. But-—after twenty years of silence—I should say, don’t !”
II
The doctor’s advice remained counterpoised in Millborne’s mind by the aforesaid mood of seriousness and sense of principle, approximating often to religious sentiment, which had been evolving itself in his breast for months, and even years.
The feeling, however, had no immediate effect upon Mr. Millborne’s actions. He soon got over his trifling illness, and was vexed with himself for haying, in a moment of impulse, confided such a case of conscience to anybody.
But the force which had prompted it, though latent, remained with him, and ultimately grew stronger. The upshot was that about four months after the date of hie illness and disclosure, Miilborne found himself on a mild spring morning at Paddington Station, in a train that was starting for the west. His many intermittent thoughts on his broken promise from time te time, in those hours when loneliness brought him face to face with bis own personality, had at last resulted in this course.
The decisive stimulus had been given when, a day or two earlier, on looking into a post-office directory, he learned that the woman he had not met for twenty years was atill living on at Exonbury under the name she had assumed when, a year or two after her disappearance from her native town and his, she had returned from abroad as a young widow with a child, and taken up her residence at the former city. Her