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 mantelpiece 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
