She had the tact to greet Durrance as one who suffered under no disadvantage, and she spoke as though she had seen him only the week before.
“I suppose Ethne has told you of our plan,” she said, as she took her tea from her friend’s hand.
“No, not yet,” Ethne answered.
“What plan?” asked Durrance.
“It is all arranged,” said Mrs. Adair. “You will want to go home to Guessens in Devonshire. I am your neighbour—a couple of fields separate us, that’s all. So Ethne will stay with me during the interval before you are married.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Adair,” Durrance exclaimed. “Because, of course, there will be an interval.”
“A short one, no doubt,” said Mrs. Adair.
“Well, it’s this way. If there’s a chance that I may recover my sight, it would be better that I should seize it at once. Time means a good deal in these cases.”
“Then there is a chance?” cried Ethne.
“I am going to see a specialist here tomorrow,” Durrance answered. “And, of course, there’s the oculist at 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 today, 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.
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
