Wiesbaden. But it may not be necessary to go so far. I expect that I shall be able to stay at Guessens and come up to London when it is necessary. Thank you very much, Mrs. Adair. It is a good plan.' And he added slowly, 'From my point of view there could be no better.'
Ethne watched Durrance drive away with his servant to his old rooms in St. James's Street, and stood by the window after he had gone, in much the same attitude and absorption as that which had characterised her before he had come. Outside in the street the carriages were now coming back from the park, and there was just one other change. Ethne's apprehensions had taken a more definite shape.
She believed that suspicion was quieted in Durrance for to-day, at all events. She had not heard his conversation with Calder in Cairo. She did not know that he believed there was no cure which could restore him to sight. She had no remotest notion that the possibility of a remedy might be a mere excuse. But none the less she was uneasy. Durrance had grown more acute. Not only his senses had been sharpened, — that, indeed, was to be expected, — but trouble and thought had sharpened his mind as well. It had become more penetrating. She felt that she was entering upon an encounter of wits, and she had a fear lest she should be worsted. 'Two lives shall not be spoilt because of me,' she repeated, but it was a prayer now, rather than a resolve. For one thing she recognised quite surely: Durrance saw ever so much more clearly now that he was blind.
Chapter XIV–Captain Willoughby Reappears
During the months of July and August Ethne's apprehensions grew, and once at all events they found expression on her lips.
'I am afraid,' she said, one morning, as she stood in the sunlight at an open window of Mrs. Adair's house upon a creek of the Salcombe estuary. In the room behind her Mrs. Adair smiled quietly.
'Of what? That some accident happened to Colonel Durrance yesterday in London?'
'No,' Ethne answered slowly, 'not of that. For he is at this moment crossing the lawn towards us.'
Again Mrs. Adair smiled, but she did not raise her head from the book which she was reading, so that it might have been some passage in the book which so amused and pleased her.
'I thought so,' she said, but in so low a voice that the words barely reached Ethne's ears. They did not penetrate to her mind, for as she looked across the stone-flagged terrace and down the broad shallow flight of steps to the lawn, she asked abruptly: 'Do you think he has any hope whatever that he will recover his sight?'
The question had not occurred to Mrs. Adair before, and she gave to it now no importance in her thoughts.
'Would he travel up to town so often to see his oculist if he had none?' she asked in reply. 'Of course he hopes.'
'I am afraid,' said Ethne, and she turned with a sudden movement towards her friend. 'Haven't you noticed how quick he has grown and is growing? Quick to interpret your silences, to infer what you do not say from what you do, to fill out your sentences, to make your movements the commentary of your words? Laura, haven't you noticed? At times I think the very corners of my mind are revealed to him. He reads me like a child's lesson book.'
'Yes,' said Mrs. Adair, 'you are at a disadvantage. You no longer have your face to screen your thoughts.'
'And his eyes no longer tell me anything at all,' Ethne added.
There was truth in both remarks. So long as Durrance had had Ethne's face with its bright colour and her steady, frank, grey eyes visible before him, he could hardly weigh her intervals of silence and her movements against her spoken words with the detachment which was now possible to him. On the other hand, whereas before she had never been troubled by a doubt as to what he meant or wished, or intended, now she was often in the dark. Durrance's blindness, in a word, had produced an effect entirely opposite to that which might have been expected. It had reversed their positions.
Mrs. Adair, however, was more interested in Ethne's unusual burst of confidence. There was no doubt of it, she reflected. The girl, once remarkable for a quiet frankness of word and look, was declining into a creature of shifts and agitation.
'There is something, then, to be concealed from him?' she asked quietly.
'Yes.'
'Something rather important?'
'Something which at all costs I must conceal,' Ethne exclaimed, and was not sure, even while she spoke, that Durrance had not already found it out. She stepped over the threshold of the window on to the terrace. In front of her the lawn stretched to a hedge; on the far side of that hedge a couple of grass fields lifted and fell in gentle undulations; and beyond the fields she could see amongst a cluster of trees the smoke from the chimneys of Colonel Durrance's house. She stood for a little while hesitating upon the terrace. On the left the lawn ran down to a line of tall beeches and oaks which fringed the creek. But a broad space had been cleared to make a gap upon the bank, so that Ethne could see the sunlight on the water and the wooded slope on the farther side, and a sailing-boat some way down the creek tacking slowly against the light wind. Ethne looked about her, as though she was summoning her resources, and even composing her sentences ready for delivery to the man who was walking steadily towards her across the lawn. If there was hesitation upon her part, there was none at all, she noticed, on the part of the blind man. It seemed that Durrance's eyes took in the path which his feet trod, and with the stick which he carried in his hand he switched at the blades of grass like one that carries it from habit rather than for any use. Ethne descended the steps and advanced to meet him. She walked slowly, as if to a difficult encounter.
But there was another who only waited an opportunity to engage in it with eagerness. For as Ethne descended the steps Mrs. Adair suddenly dropped the book which she had pretended to resume and ran towards the window. Hidden by the drapery of the curtain she looked out and watched. The smile was still upon her lips, but a fierce light had brightened in her eyes, and her face had the drawn look of hunger.
'Something which at all costs she must conceal,' she said to herself, and she said it in a voice of exultation. There was contempt too in her tone, contempt for Ethne Eustace, the woman of the open air who was afraid, who shrank from marriage with a blind man, and dreaded the restraint upon her freedom. It was that shrinking which Ethne had to conceal-Mrs. Adair had no doubt of it. 'For my part, I am glad,' she said, and she was-fiercely glad that blindness had disabled Durrance. For if her opportunity ever came, as it seemed to her now more and more likely to come, blindness reserved him to her, as no man was ever reserved to any woman. So jealous was she of his every word and look that his dependence upon her would be the extreme of pleasure. She watched Ethne and Durrance meet on the lawn at the foot of the terrace steps. She saw them turn and walk side by side across the grass towards the creek. She noticed that Ethne seemed to plead, and in her heart she longed to overhear.
And Ethne was pleading.
'You saw your oculist yesterday?' she asked quickly, as soon as they met. 'Well, what did he say?'
Durrance shrugged his shoulders.
'That one must wait. Only time can show whether a cure is possible or not,' he answered, and Ethne bent forward a little and scrutinised his face as though she doubted that he spoke the truth.
'But must you and I wait?' she asked.
'Surely,' he returned. 'It would be wiser on all counts.' And thereupon he asked her suddenly a question of which she did not see the drift. 'It was Mrs. Adair, I imagine, who proposed this plan that I should come home to Guessens and that you should stay with her here across the fields?'
Ethne was puzzled by the question, but she answered it directly and truthfully. 'I was in great distress when I heard of your accident. I was so distressed that at the first I could not think what to do. I came to London and told Laura, since she is my friend, and this was her plan. Of course I welcomed it with all my heart;' and the note of pleading rang in her voice. She was asking Durrance to confirm her words, and he understood that. He turned towards her with a smile.
'I know that very well, Ethne,' he said gently.
Ethne drew a breath of relief, and the anxiety passed for a little while from her face.
'It was kind of Mrs. Adair,' he resumed, 'but it is rather hard on you, who would like to be back in your own country. I remember very well a sentence which Harry Feversham-' He spoke the name quite carelessly, but paused
