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!”
