Chapter IX: Book IV: XXIII (1)

The next day was Darrow’s last at Givre and, foreseeing that the afternoon and evening would have to be given to the family, he had asked Anna to devote an early hour to the final consideration of their plans. He was to meet her in the brown sitting-room at ten, and they were to walk down to the river and talk over their future in the little pavilion abutting on the wall of the park.

It was just a week since his arrival at Givre, and Anna wished, before he left, to return to the place where they had sat on their first afternoon together. Her sensitiveness to the appeal of inanimate things, to the colour and texture of whatever wove itself into the substance of her emotion, made her want to hear Darrow’s voice, and to feel his eyes on her, in the spot where bliss had first flowed into her heart.

That bliss, in the interval, had wound itself into every fold of her being. Passing, in the first days, from a high shy tenderness to the rush of a secret surrender, it had gradually widened and deepened, to flow on in redoubled beauty. She thought she now knew exactly how and why she loved Darrow, and she could see her whole sky reflected in the deep and tranquil current of her love.

Early the next day, in her sitting-room, she was glancing through the letters which it was Effie’s morning privilege to carry up to her. Effie meanwhile circled inquisitively about the room, where there was always something new to engage her infant fancy; and Anna, looking up, saw her suddenly arrested before a photograph of Darrow which, the day before, had taken its place on the writing-table.

Anna held out her arms with a faint blush. “You do like him, don’t you, dear?”

“Oh, most awfully, dearest,” Effie, against her breast, leaned back to assure her with a limpid look. “And so do Granny and Owen--and I DO think Sophy does too,” she added, after a moment’s earnest pondering.

“I hope so,” Anna laughed. She checked the impulse to continue: “Has she talked to you about him, that you’re so sure?” She did not know what had made the question spring to her lips, but she was glad she had closed them before pronouncing it. Nothing could have been more distasteful to her than to clear up such obscurities by turning on them the tiny flame of her daughter’s observation. And what, after all, now that Owen’s happiness was secured, did it matter if there were certain reserves in Darrow’s approval of his marriage?

A knock on the door made Anna glance at the clock. “There’s Nurse to carry you off.”

“It’s Sophy’s knock,” the little girl answered, jumping down to open the door; and Miss Viner in fact stood on the threshold.

“Come in,” Anna said with a smile, instantly remarking how pale she looked.

“May Effie go out for a turn with Nurse?” the girl asked. “I should like to speak to you a moment.”

“Of course. This ought to be YOUR holiday, as yesterday was Effie’s. Run off, dear,” she added, stooping to kiss the little girl.

When the door had closed she turned back to Sophy Viner with a look that sought her confidence. “I’m so glad you came, my dear. We’ve got so many things to talk about, just you and I together.”

The confused intercourse of the last days had, in fact, left little time for any speech with Sophy but such as related to her marriage and the means of overcoming Madame de Chantelle’s opposition to it. Anna had exacted of Owen that no one, not even Sophy Viner, should be given a hint of her own projects till all contingent questions had been disposed of. She had felt, from the outset, a secret reluctance to intrude her securer happiness on the doubts and fears of the young pair.

From the sofa-corner to which she had dropped back she pointed to Darrow’s chair. “Come and sit by me, dear. I wanted to see you alone. There’s so much to say that I hardly know where to begin.”

She leaned forward, her hands clasped on the arms of the sofa, her eyes bent smilingly on Sophy’s. As she did so, she noticed that the girl’s unusual pallour was partly due to the slight veil of powder on her face. The discovery was distinctly disagreeable. Anna had never before noticed, on Sophy’s part, any recourse to cosmetics, and, much as she wished to think herself exempt from old-fashioned prejudices, she suddenly became aware that she did not like her daughter’s governess to have a powdered face. Then she reflected that the girl who sat opposite her was no longer Effie’s governess, but her own future daughter-in-law; and she wondered whether Miss Viner had chosen this odd way of celebrating her independence, and whether, as Mrs. Owen Leath, she would present to the world a bedizened countenance. This idea was scarcely less distasteful than the other, and for a moment Anna continued to consider her without speaking. Then, in a flash, the truth came to her: Miss Viner had powdered her face because Miss Viner had been crying.

Anna leaned forward impulsively. “My dear child, what’s the matter?” She saw the girl’s blood rush up under the white mask, and hastened on: “Please don’t be afraid to tell me. I do so want you to feel that you can trust me as Owen does. And you know you mustn’t mind if, just at first, Madame de Chantelle occasionally relapses.”

She spoke eagerly, persuasively, almost on a note of pleading. She had, in truth, so many reasons for wanting Sophy to like her: her love for Owen, her solicitude for Effie, and her own sense of the girl’s fine mettle. She had always felt a romantic and almost humble admiration for those members of her sex who, from force of will, or the constraint of circumstances, had plunged into the conflict from which fate had so persistently excluded her. There were even moments when she fancied herself vaguely to blame for her immunity, and felt that she ought somehow to have affronted the perils and hardships which refused to come to her. And now, as she sat looking at Sophy Viner, so small, so slight, so visibly defenceless and undone, she still felt, through all the superiority of her worldly advantages and her seeming maturity, the same odd sense of ignorance and inexperience. She could not have said what there was in the girl’s manner and expression to give her this feeling, but she was reminded, as she looked at Sophy Viner, of the other girls she had known in her youth, the girls who seemed possessed of a secret she had missed. Yes, Sophy Viner had their look--almost the obscurely menacing look of Kitty Mayne...Anna, with an inward smile, brushed aside the image of this forgotten rival. But she had felt, deep down, a twinge of the old pain, and she was sorry that, even for the flash of a thought, Owen’s betrothed should have reminded her of so different a woman...

She laid her hand on the girl’s. “When his grandmother sees how happy Owen is she’ll be quite happy herself. If it’s only that, don’t be distressed. Just trust to Owen--and the future.”

Sophy Viner, with an almost imperceptible recoil of her whole slight person, had drawn her hand from under the palm enclosing it.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about--the future.”

“Of course! We’ve all so many plans to make--and to fit into each other’s. Please let’s begin with yours.”

The girl paused a moment, her hands clasped on the arms of her chair, her lids dropped under Anna’s gaze; then she said: “I should like to make no plans at all ... just yet...”

“No plans?”

“No--I should like to go away ... my friends the Farlows would let me go to them...” Her voice grew firmer and she lifted her eyes to add: “I should like to leave today, if you don’t mind.”

Anna listened with a rising wonder.

“You want to leave Givre at once?” She gave the idea a moment’s swift consideration. “You prefer to be with your friends till your marriage? I understand that--but surely you needn’t rush off today? There are so many details to discuss; and before long, you know, I shall be going away too.”

“Yes, I know.” The girl was evidently trying to steady her voice. “But I should like to wait a few days--to have a little more time to myself.”

Anna continued to consider her kindly. It was evident that she did not care to say why she wished to leave Givre so suddenly, but her disturbed face and shaken voice betrayed a more pressing motive than the natural desire to spend the weeks before her marriage under her old friends’ roof. Since she had made no response to the allusion to Madame de Chantelle, Anna could but conjecture that she had had a passing disagreement with Owen; and if this were so, random interference might do more harm than good.

“My dear child, if you really want to go at once I sha’n’t, of course, urge you to stay. I suppose you have spoken to Owen?”

“No. Not yet...”

Anna threw an astonished glance at her. “You mean to say you haven’t told him?”

“I wanted to tell you first. I thought I ought to, on account of Effie.” Her look cleared as she put forth this reason.

“Oh, Effie!--” Anna’s smile brushed away the scruple. “Owen has a right to ask that you should consider him before you think of his sister...Of course you shall do just as you wish,” she went on, after another thoughtful interval.

“Oh, thank you,” Sophy Viner murmured and rose to her feet.

Anna rose also, vaguely seeking for some word that should break down the girl’s resistance. “You’ll tell Owen at once?” she finally asked.

Miss Viner, instead of replying, stood before her in manifest uncertainty, and as she did so there was a light tap on the door, and Owen Leath walked into the room.

Anna’s first glance told her that his face was unclouded. He met her greeting with his happiest smile and turned to lift Sophy’s hand to his lips. The perception that he was utterly unconscious of any cause for Miss Viner’s agitation came to his step-mother with a sharp thrill of surprise.

“Darrow’s looking for you,” he said to her. “He asked me to remind you that you’d promised to go for a walk with him.”

Anna glanced at the clock. “I’ll go down presently.” She waited and looked again at Sophy Viner, whose troubled eyes seemed to commit their message to her. “You’d better tell Owen, my dear.”

Owen’s look also turned on the girl. “Tell me what? Why, what’s happened?”

Anna summoned a laugh to ease the vague tension of the moment. “Don’t look so startled! Nothing, except that Sophy proposes to desert us for a while for the Farlows.”

Owen’s brow cleared. “I was afraid she’d run off before long.” He glanced at Anna. “Do please keep her here as long as you can!”

Sophy intervened: “Mrs. Leath’s already given me leave to go.”

“Already? To go when?”

“Today,” said Sophy in a low tone, her eyes on Anna’s.

“Today? Why on earth should you go today?” Owen dropped back a step or two, flushing and paling under his bewildered frown. His eyes seemed to search the girl more closely. “Something’s happened.” He too looked at his step-mother. “I suppose she must have told you what it is?”

Anna was struck by the suddenness and vehemence of his appeal. It was as though some smouldering apprehension had lain close under the surface of his security.

“She’s told me nothing except that she wishes to be with her friends. It’s quite natural that she should want to go to them.”

Owen visibly controlled himself. “Of course--quite natural.” He spoke to Sophy. “But why didn’t you tell me so? Why did you come first to my step-mother?”

Anna intervened with her calm smile. “That seems to me quite natural, too. Sophy was considerate enough to tell me first because of Effie.”

He weighed it. “Very well, then: that’s quite natural, as you say. And of course she must do exactly as she pleases.” He still kept his eyes on the girl. “Tomorrow,” he abruptly announced, “I shall go up to Paris to see you.”

“Oh, no--no!” she protested.

Owen turned back to Anna. “NOW do you say that nothing’s happened?”

Under the influence of his agitation Anna felt a vague tightening of the heart. She seemed to herself like some one in a dark room about whom unseen presences are groping.

“If it’s anything that Sophy wishes to tell you, no doubt she’ll do so. I’m going down now, and I’ll leave you here to talk it over by yourselves.”

As she moved to the door the girl caught up with her. “But there’s nothing to tell: why should there be? I’ve explained that I simply want to be quiet.” Her look seemed to detain Mrs. Leath.

Owen broke in: “Is that why I mayn’t go up tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow!”

“Then when may I?”

“Later ... in a little while ... a few days...”

“In how many days?” “Owen!” his step-mother interposed; but he seemed no longer aware of her. “If you go away today, the day that our engagement’s made known, it’s only fair,” he persisted, “that you should tell me when I am to see you.”

Sophy’s eyes wavered between the two and dropped down wearily. “It’s you who are not fair--when I’ve said I wanted to be quiet.”

“But why should my coming disturb you? I’m not asking now to come tomorrow. I only ask you not to leave without telling me when I’m to see you.”

“Owen, I don’t understand you!” his step-mother exclaimed.

“You don’t understand my asking for some explanation, some assurance, when I’m left in this way, without a word, without a sign? All I ask her to tell me is when she’ll see me.”

Anna turned back to Sophy Viner, who stood straight and tremulous between the two.

“After all, my dear, he’s not unreasonable!”

“I’ll write--I’ll write,” the girl repeated.

“WHAT will you write?” he pressed her vehemently.

“Owen,” Anna exclaimed, “you are unreasonable!”

He turned from Sophy to his step-mother. “I only want her to say what she means: that she’s going to write to break off our engagement. Isn’t that what you’re going away for?”

Anna felt the contagion of his excitement. She looked at Sophy, who stood motionless, her lips set, her whole face drawn to a silent fixity of resistance.

“You ought to speak, my dear--you ought to answer him.”

“I only ask him to wait----”

“Yes,” Owen, broke in, “and you won’t say how long!”

Both instinctively addressed themselves to Anna, who stood, nearly as shaken as themselves, between the double shock of their struggle. She looked again from Sophy’s inscrutable eyes to Owen’s stormy features; then she said: “What can I do, when there’s clearly something between you that I don’t know about?”

“Oh, if it WERE between us! Can’t you see it’s outside of us--outside of her, dragging at her, dragging her away from me?” Owen wheeled round again upon his step-mother.

Anna turned from him to the girl. “Is it true that you want to break your engagement? If you do, you ought to tell him now.”

Owen burst into a laugh. “She doesn’t dare to--she’s afraid I’ll guess the reason!”

A faint sound escaped from Sophy’s lips, but she kept them close on whatever answer she had ready.

“If she doesn’t wish to marry you, why should she be afraid to have you know the reason?”

“She’s afraid to have YOU know it--not me!”

“To have ME know it?”

He laughed again, and Anna, at his laugh, felt a sudden rush of indignation.

“Owen, you must explain what you mean!”

He looked at her hard before answering; then: “Ask Darrow!” he said.

“Owen--Owen!” Sophy Viner murmured.

XXIV

Anna stood looking from one to the other. It had become apparent to her in a flash that Owen’s retort, though it startled Sophy, did not take her by surprise; and the discovery shot its light along dark distances of fear.

The immediate inference was that Owen had guessed the reason of Darrow’s disapproval of his marriage, or that, at least, he suspected Sophy Viner of knowing and dreading it. This confirmation of her own obscure doubt sent a tremor of alarm through Anna. For a moment she felt like exclaiming: “All this is really no business of mine, and I refuse to have you mix me up in it--” but her secret fear held her fast.

Sophy Viner was the first to speak.

“I should like to go now,” she said in a low voice, taking a few steps toward the door.

Her tone woke Anna to the sense of her own share in the situation. “I quite agree with you, my dear, that it’s useless to carry on this discussion. But since Mr. Darrow’s name has been brought into it, for reasons which I fail to guess, I want to tell you that you’re both mistaken if you think he’s not in sympathy with your marriage. If that’s what Owen means to imply, the idea’s a complete delusion.”

She spoke the words deliberately and incisively, as if hoping that the sound of their utterance would stifle the whisper in her bosom.

Sophy’s only answer was a vague murmur, and a movement that brought her nearer to the door; but before she could reach it Owen had placed himself in her way.

“I don’t mean to imply what you think,” he said, addressing his step-mother but keeping his eyes on the girl. “I don’t say Darrow doesn’t like our marriage; I say it’s Sophy who’s hated it since Darrow’s been here!”

He brought out the charge in a tone of forced composure, but his lips were white and he grasped the doorknob to hide the tremor of his hand.

Anna’s anger surged up with her fears. “You’re absurd, Owen! I don’t know why I listen to you. Why should Sophy dislike Mr. Darrow, and if she does, why should that have anything to do with her wishing to break her engagement?”

“I don’t say she dislikes him! I don’t say she likes him; I don’t know what it is they say to each other when they’re shut up together alone.”

“Shut up together alone?” Anna stared. Owen seemed like a man in delirium; such an exhibition was degrading to them all. But he pushed on without seeing her look.

“Yes--the first evening she came, in the study; the next morning, early, in the park; yesterday, again, in the spring-house, when you were at the lodge with the doctor...I don’t know what they say to each other, but they’ve taken every chance they could to say it ... and to say it when they thought that no one saw them.”

Anna longed to silence him, but no words came to her. It was as though all her confused apprehensions had suddenly taken definite shape. There was “something”--yes, there was “something”...Darrow’s reticences and evasions had been more than a figment of her doubts.

The next instant brought a recoil of pride. She turned indignantly on her step-son.

“I don’t half understand what you’ve been saying; but what you seem to hint is so preposterous, and so insulting both to Sophy and to me, that I see no reason why we should listen to you any longer.”

Though her tone steadied Owen, she perceived at once that it would not deflect him from his purpose. He spoke less vehemently, but with all the more precision.

“How can it be preposterous, since it’s true? Or insulting, since I don’t know, any more than YOU, the meaning of what I’ve been seeing? If you’ll be patient with me I’ll try to put it quietly. What I mean is that Sophy has completely changed since she met Darrow here, and that, having noticed the change, I’m hardly to blame for having tried to find out its cause.”

Anna made an effort to answer him with the same composure. “You’re to blame, at any rate, for so recklessly assuming that you HAVE found it out. You seem to forget that, till they met here, Sophy and Mr. Darrow hardly knew each other.”

“If so, it’s all the stranger that they’ve been so often closeted together!”

“Owen, Owen--” the girl sighed out.

He turned his haggard face to her. “Can I help it, if I’ve seen and known what I wasn’t meant to? For God’s sake give me a reason--any reason I can decently make out with! Is it my fault if, the day after you arrived, when I came back late through the garden, the curtains of the study hadn’t been drawn, and I saw you there alone with Darrow?”

Anna laughed impatiently. “Really, Owen, if you make it a grievance that two people who are staying in the same house should be seen talking together----!”

“They were not talking. That’s the point----”

“Not talking? How do you know? You could hardly hear them from the garden!”

“No; but I could see. HE was sitting at my desk, with his face in his hands. SHE was standing in the window, looking away from him...”

He waited, as if for Sophy Viner’s answer; but still she neither stirred nor spoke.

“That was the first time,” he went on; “and the second was the next morning in the park. It was natural enough, their meeting there. Sophy had gone out with Effie, and Effie ran back to look for me. She told me she’d left Sophy and Darrow in the path that leads to the river, and presently we saw them ahead of us. They didn’t see us at first, because they were standing looking at each other; and this time they were not speaking either. We came up close before they heard us, and all that time they never spoke, or stopped looking at each other. After that I began to wonder; and so I watched them.”

“Oh, Owen!” “Oh, I only had to wait. Yesterday, when I motored you and the doctor back from the lodge, I saw Sophy coming out of the spring-house. I supposed she’d taken shelter from the rain, and when you got out of the motor I strolled back down the avenue to meet her. But she’d disappeared--she must have taken a short cut and come into the house by the side door. I don’t know why I went on to the spring-house; I suppose it was what you’d call spying. I went up the steps and found the room empty; but two chairs had been moved out from the wall and were standing near the table; and one of the Chinese screens that lie on it had dropped to the floor.”

Anna sounded a faint note of irony. “Really? Sophy’d gone there for shelter, and she dropped a screen and moved a chair?”

“I said two chairs----”

“Two? What damning evidence--of I don’t know what!”

“Simply of the fact that Darrow’d been there with her. As I looked out of the window I saw him close by, walking away. He must have turned the corner of the spring-house just as I got to the door.”

There was another silence, during which Anna paused, not only to collect her own words but to wait for Sophy Viner’s; then, as the girl made no sign, she turned to her.

“I’ve absolutely nothing to say to all this; but perhaps you’d like me to wait and hear your answer?”

Sophy raised her head with a quick flash of colour. “I’ve no answer either--except that Owen must be mad.”

In the interval since she had last spoken she seemed to have regained her self-control, and her voice rang clear, with a cold edge of anger.

Anna looked at her step-son. He had grown extremely pale, and his hand fell from the door with a discouraged gesture. “That’s all then? You won’t give me any reason?”

“I didn’t suppose it was necessary to give you or any one else a reason for talking with a friend of Mrs. Leath’s under Mrs. Leath’s own roof.”

Owen hardly seemed to feel the retort: he kept his dogged stare on her face.

“I won’t ask for one, then. I’ll only ask you to give me your assurance that your talks with Darrow have had nothing to do with your suddenly deciding to leave Givre.”

She hesitated, not so much with the air of weighing her answer as of questioning his right to exact any. “I give you my assurance; and now I should like to go,” she said.

As she turned away, Anna intervened. “My dear, I think you ought to speak.”

The girl drew herself up with a faint laugh. “To him--or to YOU?”

“To him.”

She stiffened. “I’ve said all there is to say.”

Anna drew back, her eyes on her step-son. He had left the threshold and was advancing toward Sophy Viner with a motion of desperate appeal; but as he did so there was a knock on the door. A moment’s silence fell on the three; then Anna said: “Come in!”

Darrow came into the room. Seeing the three together, he looked rapidly from one to the other; then he turned to Anna with a smile.

“I came up to see if you were ready; but please send me off if I’m not wanted.”

His look, his voice, the simple sense of his presence, restored Anna’s shaken balance. By Owen’s side he looked so strong, so urbane, so experienced, that the lad’s passionate charges dwindled to mere boyish vapourings. A moment ago she had dreaded Darrow’s coming; now she was glad that he was there.

She turned to him with sudden decision. “Come in, please; I want you to hear what Owen has been saying.”

She caught a murmur from Sophy Viner, but disregarded it. An illuminating impulse urged her on. She, habitually so aware of her own lack of penetration, her small skill in reading hidden motives and detecting secret signals, now felt herself mysteriously inspired. She addressed herself to Sophy Viner. “It’s much better for you both that this absurd question should be cleared up now.” Then, turning to Darrow, she continued: “For some reason that I don’t pretend to guess, Owen has taken it into his head that you’ve influenced Miss Viner to break her engagement.”

She spoke slowly and deliberately, because she wished to give time and to gain it; time for Darrow and Sophy to receive the full impact of what she was saying, and time to observe its full effect on them. She had said to herself: “If there’s nothing between them, they’ll look at each other; if there IS something, they won’t;” and as she ceased to speak she felt as if all her life were in her eyes.

Sophy, after a start of protest, remained motionless, her gaze on the ground. Darrow, his face grown grave, glanced slowly from Owen Leath to Anna. With his eyes on the latter he asked: “Has Miss Viner broken her engagement?”

A moment’s silence followed his question; then the girl looked up and said: “Yes!”

Owen, as she spoke, uttered a smothered exclamation and walked out of the room. She continued to stand in the same place, without appearing to notice his departure, and without vouchsafing an additional word of explanation; then, before Anna could find a cry to detain her, she too turned and went out.

“For God’s sake, what’s happened?” Darrow asked; but Anna, with a drop of the heart, was saying to herself that he and Sophy Viner had not looked at each other.

XXV

Anna stood in the middle of the room, her eyes on the door. Darrow’s questioning gaze was still on her, and she said to herself with a quick-drawn breath: “If only he doesn’t come near me!”

It seemed to her that she had been suddenly endowed with the fatal gift of reading the secret sense of every seemingly spontaneous look and movement, and that in his least gesture of affection she would detect a cold design.

For a moment longer he continued to look at her enquiringly; then he turned away and took up his habitual stand by the mantel-piece. She drew a deep breath of relief.

“Won’t you please explain?” he said.

“I can’t explain: I don’t know. I didn’t even know--till she told you--that she really meant to break her engagement. All I know is that she came to me just now and said she wished to leave Givre today; and that Owen, when he heard of it--for she hadn’t told him--at once accused her of going away with the secret intention of throwing him over.”

“And you think it’s a definite break?” She perceived, as she spoke, that his brow had cleared.

“How should I know? Perhaps you can tell me.”

“I?” She fancied his face clouded again, but he did not move from his tranquil attitude.

“As I told you,” she went on, “Owen has worked himself up to imagining that for some mysterious reason you’ve influenced Sophy against him.”

Darrow still visibly wondered. “It must indeed be a mysterious reason! He knows how slightly I know Miss Viner. Why should he imagine anything so wildly improbable?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“But he must have hinted at some reason.”

“No: he admits he doesn’t know your reason. He simply says that Sophy’s manner to him has changed since she came back to Givre and that he’s seen you together several times--in the park, the spring-house, I don’t know where--talking alone in a way that seemed confidential--almost secret; and he draws the preposterous conclusion that you’ve used your influence to turn her against him.”

“My influence? What kind of influence?”

“He doesn’t say.”

Darrow again seemed to turn over the facts she gave him. His face remained grave, but without the least trace of discomposure. “And what does Miss Viner say?”

“She says it’s perfectly natural that she should occasionally talk to my friends when she’s under my roof--and refuses to give him any other explanation.”

“That at least is perfectly natural!”

Anna felt her cheeks flush as she answered: “Yes--but there is something----”

“Something----?”

“Some reason for her sudden decision to break her engagement. I can understand Owen’s feeling, sorry as I am for his way of showing it. The girl owes him some sort of explanation, and as long as she refuses to give it his imagination is sure to run wild.”

“She would have given it, no doubt, if he’d asked it in a different tone.”

“I don’t defend Owen’s tone--but she knew what it was before she accepted him. She knows he’s excitable and undisciplined.”

“Well, she’s been disciplining him a little--probably the best thing that could happen. Why not let the matter rest there?”

“Leave Owen with the idea that you HAVE been the cause of the break?”

He met the question with his easy smile. “Oh, as to that--leave him with any idea of me he chooses! But leave him, at any rate, free.”

“Free?” she echoed in surprise.

“Simply let things be. You’ve surely done all you could for him and Miss Viner. If they don’t hit it off it’s their own affair. What possible motive can you have for trying to interfere now?”

Her gaze widened to a deeper wonder. “Why--naturally, what he says of you!”

“I don’t care a straw what he says of me! In such a situation a boy in love will snatch at the most far-fetched reason rather than face the mortifying fact that the lady may simply be tired of him.”

“You don t quite understand Owen. Things go deep with him, and last long. It took him a long time to recover from his other unlucky love affair. He’s romantic and extravagant: he can’t live on the interest of his feelings. He worships Sophy and she seemed to be fond of him. If she’s changed it’s been very sudden. And if they part like this, angrily and inarticulately, it will hurt him horribly--hurt his very soul. But that, as you say, is between the two. What concerns me is his associating you with their quarrel. Owen’s like my own son--if you’d seen him when I first came here you’d know why. We were like two prisoners who talk to each other by tapping on the wall. He’s never forgotten it, nor I. Whether he breaks with Sophy, or whether they make it up, I can’t let him think you had anything to do with it.”

She raised her eyes entreatingly to Darrow’s, and read in them the forbearance of the man resigned to the discussion of non-existent problems.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” he said; “but I don’t yet know what it is.”

His smile seemed to charge her with inconsequence, and the prick to her pride made her continue: “After all, it’s not so unnatural that Owen, knowing you and Sophy to be almost strangers, should wonder what you were saying to each other when he saw you talking together.”

She felt a warning tremor as she spoke, as though some instinct deeper than reason surged up in defense of its treasure. But Darrow’s face was unstirred save by the flit of his half-amused smile.

“Well, my dear--and couldn’t you have told him?” “I?” she faltered out through her blush.

“You seem to forget, one and all of you, the position you put me in when I came down here: your appeal to me to see Owen through, your assurance to him that I would, Madame de Chantelle’s attempt to win me over; and most of all, my own sense of the fact you’ve just recalled to me: the importance, for both of us, that Owen should like me. It seemed to me that the first thing to do was to get as much light as I could on the whole situation; and the obvious way of doing it was to try to know Miss Viner better. Of course I’ve talked with her alone--I’ve talked with her as often as I could. I’ve tried my best to find out if you were right in encouraging Owen to marry her.”

She listened with a growing sense of reassurance, struggling to separate the abstract sense of his words from the persuasion in which his eyes and voice enveloped them.

“I see--I do see,” she murmured.

“You must see, also, that I could hardly say this to Owen without offending him still more, and perhaps increasing the breach between Miss Viner and himself. What sort of figure should I cut if I told him I’d been trying to find out if he’d made a proper choice? In any case, it’s none of my business to offer an explanation of what she justly says doesn’t need one. If she declines to speak, it’s obviously on the ground that Owen’s insinuations are absurd; and that surely pledges me to silence.”

“Yes, yes! I see,” Anna repeated. “But I don’t want you to explain anything to Owen.”

“You haven’t yet told me what you do want.”

She hesitated, conscious of the difficulty of justifying her request; then: “I want you to speak to Sophy,” she said.

Darrow broke into an incredulous laugh. “Considering what my previous attempts have resulted in----!”

She raised her eyes quickly. “They haven’t, at least, resulted in your liking her less, in your thinking less well of her than you’ve told me?”

She fancied he frowned a little. “I wonder why you go back to that?”

“I want to be sure--I owe it to Owen. Won’t you tell me the exact impression she’s produced on you?”

“I have told you--I like Miss Viner.”

“Do you still believe she’s in love with Owen?”

“There was nothing in our short talks to throw any particular light on that.”

“You still believe, though, that there’s no reason why he shouldn’t marry her?”

Again he betrayed a restrained impatience. “How can I answer that without knowing her reasons for breaking with him?”

“That’s just what I want you to find out from her.”

“And why in the world should she tell me?”

“Because, whatever grievance she has against Owen, she can certainly have none against me. She can’t want to have Owen connect me in his mind with this wretched quarrel; and she must see that he will until he’s convinced you’ve had no share in it.”

Darrow’s elbow dropped from the mantel-piece and he took a restless step or two across the room. Then he halted before her.

“Why can’t you tell her this yourself?”

“Don’t you see?”

He eyed her intently, and she pressed on: “You must have guessed that Owen’s jealous of you.”

“Jealous of me?” The blood flew up under his brown skin.

“Blind with it--what else would drive him to this folly? And I can’t have her think me jealous too! I’ve said all I could, short of making her think so; and she’s refused a word more to either of us. Our only chance now is that she should listen to you--that you should make her see the harm her silence may do.”

Darrow uttered a protesting exclamation. “It’s all too preposterous--what you suggest! I can’t, at any rate, appeal to her on such a ground as that!”

Anna laid her hand on his arm. “Appeal to her on the ground that I’m almost Owen’s mother, and that any estrangement between you and him would kill me. She knows what he is--she’ll understand. Tell her to say anything, do anything, she wishes; but not to go away without speaking, not to leave THAT between us when she goes!”

She drew back a step and lifted her face to his, trying to look into his eyes more deeply than she had ever looked; but before she could discern what they expressed he had taken hold of her hands and bent his head to kiss them.

“You’ll see her? You’ll see her?” she entreated; and he answered: “I’ll do anything in the world you want me to.”

XXVI

Darrow waited alone in the sitting-room.

No place could have been more distasteful as the scene of the talk that lay before him; but he had acceded to Anna’s suggestion that it would seem more natural for her to summon Sophy Viner than for him to go in search of her. As his troubled pacings carried him back and forth a relentless hand seemed to be tearing away all the tender fibres of association that bound him to the peaceful room. Here, in this very place, he had drunk his deepest draughts of happiness, had had his lips at the fountain-head of its overflowing rivers; but now that source was poisoned and he would taste no more of an untainted cup.

For a moment he felt an actual physical anguish; then his nerves hardened for the coming struggle. He had no notion of what awaited him; but after the first instinctive recoil he had seen in a flash the urgent need of another word with Sophy Viner. He had been insincere in letting Anna think that he had consented to speak because she asked it. In reality he had been feverishly casting about for the pretext she had given him; and for some reason this trivial hypocrisy weighed on him more than all his heavy burden of deceit.

At length he heard a step behind him and Sophy Viner entered. When she saw him she paused on the threshold and half drew back.

“I was told that Mrs. Leath had sent for me.”

“Mrs. Leath DID send for you. She’ll be here presently; but I asked her to let me see you first.”

He spoke very gently, and there was no insincerity in his gentleness. He was profoundly moved by the change in the girl’s appearance. At sight of him she had forced a smile; but it lit up her wretchedness like a candle-flame held to a dead face.

She made no reply, and Darrow went on: “You must understand my wanting to speak to you, after what I was told just now.”

She interposed, with a gesture of protest: “I’m not responsible for Owen’s ravings!”

“Of course----”. He broke off and they stood facing each other. She lifted a hand and pushed back her loose lock with the gesture that was burnt into his memory; then she looked about her and dropped into the nearest chair.

“Well, you’ve got what you wanted,” she said.

“What do you mean by what I wanted?”

“My engagement’s broken--you heard me say so.”

“Why do you say that’s what I wanted? All I wished, from the beginning, was to advise you, to help you as best I could----”

“That’s what you’ve done,” she rejoined. “You’ve convinced me that it’s best I shouldn’t marry him.”

Darrow broke into a despairing laugh. “At the very moment when you’d convinced me to the contrary!”

“Had I?” Her smile flickered up. “Well, I really believed it till you showed me ... warned me...”

“Warned you?”

“That I’d be miserable if I married a man I didn’t love.”

“Don’t you love him?”

She made no answer, and Darrow started up and walked away to the other end of the room. He stopped before the writing-table, where his photograph, well-dressed, handsome, self-sufficient--the portrait of a man of the world, confident of his ability to deal adequately with the most delicate situations--offered its huge fatuity to his gaze. He turned back to her. “It’s rather hard on Owen, isn’t it, that you should have waited until now to tell him?”

She reflected a moment before answering. “I told him as soon as I knew.”

“Knew that you couldn’t marry him?”

“Knew that I could never live here with him.” She looked about the room, as though the very walls must speak for her.

For a moment Darrow continued to search her face perplexedly; then their eyes met in a long disastrous gaze.

“Yes----” she said, and stood up.

Below the window they heard Effie whistling for her dogs, and then, from the terrace, her mother calling her.

“There--THAT for instance,” Sophy Viner said.

Darrow broke out: “It’s I who ought to go!”

She kept her small pale smile. “What good would that do any of us--now?”

He covered his face with his hands. “Good God!” he groaned. “How could I tell?”

“You couldn’t tell. We neither of us could.” She seemed to turn the problem over critically. “After all, it might have been YOU instead of me!”

He took another distracted turn about the room and coming back to her sat down in a chair at her side. A mocking hand seemed to dash the words from his lips. There was nothing on earth that he could say to her that wasn’t foolish or cruel or contemptible...

“My dear,” he began at last, “oughtn’t you, at any rate, to try?”

Her gaze grew grave. “Try to forget you?”

He flushed to the forehead. “I meant, try to give Owen more time; to give him a chance. He’s madly in love with you; all the good that’s in him is in your hands. His step-mother felt that from the first. And she thought--she believed----”

“She thought I could make him happy. Would she think so now?”

“Now...? I don’t say now. But later? Time modifies ... rubs out ... more quickly than you think...Go away, but let him hope...I’m going too--WE’RE going--” he stumbled on the plural--“in a very few weeks: going for a long time, probably. What you’re thinking of now may never happen. We may not all be here together again for years.”

She heard him out in silence, her hands clasped on her knee, her eyes bent on them. “For me,” she said, “you’ll always be here.”

“Don’t say that--oh, don’t! Things change ... people change...You’ll see!”

“You don’t understand. I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to forget--to rub out. At first I imagined I did; but that was a foolish mistake. As soon as I saw you again I knew it... It’s not being here with you that I’m afraid of--in the sense you think. It’s being here, or anywhere, with Owen.” She stood up and bent her tragic smile on him. “I want to keep you all to myself.”

The only words that came to him were futile denunciations of his folly; but the sense of their futility checked them on his lips. “Poor child--you poor child!” he heard himself vainly repeating.

Suddenly he felt the strong reaction of reality and its impetus brought him to his feet. “Whatever happens, I intend to go--to go for good,” he exclaimed. “I want you to understand that. Oh, don’t be afraid--I’ll find a reason. But it’s perfectly clear that I must go.”

She uttered a protesting cry. “Go away? You? Don’t you see that that would tell everything--drag everybody into the horror?”

He found no answer, and her voice dropped back to its calmer note. “What good would your going do? Do you suppose it would change anything for me?” She looked at him with a musing wistfulness. “I wonder what your feeling for me was? It seems queer that I’ve never really known--I suppose we DON’T know much about that kind of feeling. Is it like taking a drink when you’re thirsty?... I used to feel as if all of me was in the palm of your hand...”

He bowed his humbled head, but she went on almost exultantly: “Don’t for a minute think I’m sorry! It was worth every penny it cost. My mistake was in being ashamed, just at first, of its having cost such a lot. I tried to carry it off as a joke--to talk of it to myself as an ‘adventure’. I’d always wanted adventures, and you’d given me one, and I tried to take your attitude about it, to ‘play the game’ and convince myself that I hadn’t risked any more on it than you. Then, when I met you again, I suddenly saw that I HAD risked more, but that I’d won more, too--such worlds! I’d been trying all the while to put everything I could between us; now I want to sweep everything away. I’d been trying to forget how you looked; now I want to remember you always. I’d been trying not to hear your voice; now I never want to hear any other. I’ve made my choice--that’s all: I’ve had you and I mean to keep you.” Her face was shining like her eyes. “To keep you hidden away here,” she ended, and put her hand upon her breast.

After she had left him, Darrow continued to sit motionless, staring back into their past. Hitherto it had lingered on the edge of his mind in a vague pink blur, like one of the little rose-leaf clouds that a setting sun drops from its disk. Now it was a huge looming darkness, through which his eyes vainly strained. The whole episode was still obscure to him, save where here and there, as they talked, some phrase or gesture or intonation of the girl’s had lit up a little spot in the night.

She had said: “I wonder what your feeling for me was?” and he found himself wondering too...He remembered distinctly enough that he had not meant the perilous passion--even in its most transient form--to play a part in their relation. In that respect his attitude had been above reproach. She was an unusually original and attractive creature, to whom he had wanted to give a few days of harmless pleasuring, and who was alert and expert enough to understand his intention and spare him the boredom of hesitations and misinterpretations. That had been his first impression, and her subsequent demeanour had justified it. She had been, from the outset, just the frank and easy comrade he had expected to find her. Was it he, then, who, in the sequel, had grown impatient of the bounds he had set himself? Was it his wounded vanity that, seeking balm for its hurt, yearned to dip deeper into the healing pool of her compassion? In his confused memory of the situation he seemed not to have been guiltless of such yearnings...Yet for the first few days the experiment had been perfectly successful. Her enjoyment had been unclouded and his pleasure in it undisturbed. It was very gradually--he seemed to see--that a shade of lassitude had crept over their intercourse. Perhaps it was because, when her light chatter about people failed, he found she had no other fund to draw on, or perhaps simply because of the sweetness of her laugh, or of the charm of the gesture with which, one day in the woods of Marly, she had tossed off her hat and tilted back her head at the call of a cuckoo; or because, whenever he looked at her unexpectedly, he found that she was looking at him and did not want him to know it; or perhaps, in varying degrees, because of all these things, that there had come a moment when no word seemed to fly high enough or dive deep enough to utter the sense of well-being each gave to the other, and the natural substitute for speech had been a kiss.

The kiss, at all events, had come at the precise moment to save their venture from disaster. They had reached the point when her amazing reminiscences had begun to flag, when her future had been exhaustively discussed, her theatrical prospects minutely studied, her quarrel with Mrs. Murrett retold with the last amplification of detail, and when, perhaps conscious of her exhausted resources and his dwindling interest, she had committed the fatal error of saying that she could see he was unhappy, and entreating him to tell her why...

From the brink of estranging confidences, and from the risk of unfavourable comparisons, his gesture had snatched her back to safety; and as soon as he had kissed her he felt that she would never bore him again. She was one of the elemental creatures whose emotion is all in their pulses, and who become inexpressive or sentimental when they try to turn sensation into speech. His caress had restored her to her natural place in the scheme of things, and Darrow felt as if he had clasped a tree and a nymph had bloomed from it...

The mere fact of not having to listen to her any longer added immensely to her charm. She continued, of course, to talk to him, but it didn’t matter, because he no longer made any effort to follow her words, but let her voice run on as a musical undercurrent to his thoughts.

She hadn’t a drop of poetry in her, but she had some of the qualities that create it in others; and in moments of heat the imagination does not always feel the difference...

Lying beside her in the shade, Darrow felt her presence as a part of the charmed stillness of the summer woods, as the element of vague well-being that suffused his senses and lulled to sleep the ache of wounded pride. All he asked of her, as yet, was a touch on the hand or on the lips--and that she should let him go on lying there through the long warm hours, while a black-bird’s song throbbed like a fountain, and the summer wind stirred in the trees, and close by, between the nearest branches and the brim of his tilted hat, a slight white figure gathered up all the floating threads of joy...

He recalled, too, having noticed, as he lay staring at a break in the tree-tops, a stream of mares’-tails coming up the sky. He had said to himself: “It will rain to-morrow,” and the thought had made the air seem warmer and the sun more vivid on her hair...Perhaps if the mares’-tails had not come up the sky their adventure might have had no sequel. But the cloud brought rain, and next morning he looked out of his window into a cold grey blur. They had planned an all-day excursion down the Seine, to the two Andelys and Rouen, and now, with the long hours on their hands, they were both a little at a loss...There was the Louvre, of course, and the Luxembourg; but he had tried looking at pictures with her, she had first so persistently admired the worst things, and then so frankly lapsed into indifference, that he had no wish to repeat the experiment. So they went out, aimlessly, and took a cold wet walk, turning at length into the deserted arcades of the Palais Royal, and finally drifting into one of its equally deserted restaurants, where they lunched alone and somewhat dolefully, served by a wan old waiter with the look of a castaway who has given up watching for a sail... It was odd how the waiter’s face came back to him...