Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 65: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

48 REYNOLDS’ WORKS right coward. On the day after his breach with Emily Archer and Lord Harold Staunton he had visited a billiard-room in Bond Street, where he found himself, if not exactly cut, at least treated with such marked coldness by the gentle- men present that not even his vanity could blind his eyes to the circumstance, and ne had speedily left the place in bitterest mortification. We now find him, as stated at the commencement of this chapter, dining alone at Saxondale House. He had written in the morning to two or three acquaintances to invite them to dinner, but from each he had received a letter of refusal, couched in terms coldly courteous, and without alleging any reason for thus declining. No wonder, therefore, was it that he felt dispirited and discontented. Addicted though he was to wine, he could not enjoy it now. He knew not what to do with himself. This was the third day since his breach with Emily, and he had remained indoors almost entirely since the little demonstration at the billiard- table. He was horribly ennuyé; he knew not what to do with himself. He had no intellectual resources, and even the last three-volume novel issued from some West End publisher’s establishment failed to amuse him. He now missed both Harold Staunton and Emily Archer. He re- eretted having quarrelled with them. He was ignorant that his late mistress had left London, — equally ignorant of the terrible fate which had befallen her, inasmuch as there had not as yet been time for an account of the tragedy to appear in the London newspapers. As he sat sipping his wine, more from habit than because he really liked it on the present occasion, he said to himselt, ‘““T have an uncommon great mind to go and see Emily, and endeavour to make it up with her. What if she was really unfaithful to me? She is only like the rest of them, and I certainly could not find a handsomer mistress. Be- sides, after all, she was an amusing girl enough, and we got on very well together till that cursed affair took place. I was in a terrible rage at the time, but it was enough to make me so. Yes, I will go and see her, for this is such precious dull work. I shall be glad to make it up with her, even if she had behaved twice as badly.”’ Having come to this resolution, Lord Saxondale issued forth, and taking a cab from the nearest stand in Oxford Gomicbooks co