Claire had not been square. It was that, more than the shock of
surprise of Lady Wetherby's news, that had sent him striding along
the State Road at the rate of five miles an hour, staring before
him with unseeing eyes. A sudden recollection of their last
interview brought a dull flush to Bill's face and accelerated his
speed. He felt physically ill.
It was not immediately that he had arrived at even this sketchy
outline of his feelings. For perhaps a mile he walked as the
scorpion-stung natives run--blindly, wildly, with nothing in his
mind but a desire to walk faster and faster, to walk as no man had
ever walked before. And then--one does not wish to be unduly
realistic, but the fact is too important to be ignored--he began
to perspire. And hard upon that unrefined but wonder-working flow
came a certain healing of spirit. Dimly at first but every moment
more clearly, he found it possible to think.
In a man of Bill's temperament there are so many qualities wounded
by a blow such as he had received, that it is hardly surprising
that his emotions, when he began to examine them, were mixed. Now
one, now another, of his wounds presented itself to his notice.
And then individual wounds would become difficult to distinguish
in the mass of injuries. Spiritually, he was in the position of a
man who has been hit simultaneously in a number of sensitive spots
by a variety of hard and hurtful things.
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