A deep flush rose to his forehead. "Oh, I know--I know that--" he declared hastily; and added, with a fact.i.tious animation: "But thank you for telling me."
"There"s nothing, is there," she continued, "to make our meeting in this way in the least embarra.s.sing or painful to either of us, when both have found...." She broke off, and held her hand out to him. "I"ve heard about you and Coral," she ended.
He just touched her hand with cold fingers, and let it drop. "Thank you," he said for the third time.
"You won"t sit down?"
He sat down.
"Don"t you think," she continued, "that the new way of... of meeting as friends... and talking things over without ill-will... is much pleasanter and more sensible, after all?"
He smiled. "It"s immensely kind of you to feel that."
"Oh, I do feel it!" She stopped short, and wondered what on earth she had meant to say next, and why she had so abruptly lost the thread of her discourse.
In the pause she heard him cough slightly and clear his throat. "Let me say, then," he began, "that I"m glad too--immensely glad that your own future is so satisfactorily settled."
She lifted her glance again to his walled face, in which not a muscle stirred.
"Yes: it--it makes everything easier for you, doesn"t it?"
"For you too, I hope." He paused, and then went on: "I want also to tell you that I perfectly understand--"
"Oh," she interrupted, "so do I; your point of view, I mean."
They were again silent.
"Nick, why can"t we be friends real friends? Won"t it be easier?" she broke out at last with twitching lips.
"Easier--?"
"I mean, about talking things over--arrangements. There are arrangements to be made, I suppose?"
"I suppose so." He hesitated. "I"m doing what I"m told-simply following out instructions. The business is easy enough, apparently. I"m taking the necessary steps--"
She reddened a little, and drew a gasping breath. "The necessary steps: what are they? Everything the lawyers tell one is so confusing.... I don"t yet understand--how it"s done."
"My share, you mean? Oh, it"s very simple." He paused, and added in a tone of laboured ease: "I"m going down to Fontainebleau to-morrow--"
She stared, not understanding. "To Fontainebleau--?"
Her bewilderment drew from him his first frank smile. "Well--I chose Fontainebleau--I don"t know why... except that we"ve never been there together."
At that she suddenly understood, and the blood rushed to her forehead.
She stood up without knowing what she was doing, her heart in her throat. "How grotesque--how utterly disgusting!"
He gave a slight shrug. "I didn"t make the laws...."
"But isn"t it too stupid and degrading that such things should be necessary when two people want to part--?" She broke off again, silenced by the echo of that fatal "want to part."...
He seemed to prefer not to dwell farther on the legal obligations involved.
"You haven"t yet told me," he suggested, "how you happen to be living here."
"Here--with the Fulmer children?" She roused herself, trying to catch his easier note. "Oh, I"ve simply been governessing them for a few weeks, while Nat and Grace are in Sicily." She did not say: "It"s because I"ve parted with Strefford." Somehow it helped her wounded pride a little to keep from him the secret of her precarious independence.
He looked his wonder. "All alone with that bewildered bonne? But how many of them are there? Five? Good Lord!" He contemplated the clock with unseeing eyes, and then turned them again on her face.
"I should have thought a lot of children would rather get on your nerves."
"Oh, not these children. They"re so good to me."
"Ah, well, I suppose it won"t be for long."
He sent his eyes again about the room, which his absent-minded gaze seemed to reduce to its dismal const.i.tuent elements, and added, with an obvious effort at small talk: "I hear the Fulmers are not hitting it off very well since his success. Is it true that he"s going to marry Violet Melrose?"
The blood rose to Susy"s face. "Oh, never, never! He and Grace are travelling together now."
"Oh, I didn"t know. People say things...." He was visibly embarra.s.sed with the subject, and sorry that he had broached it.
"Some of the things that people say are true. But Grace doesn"t mind.
She says she and Nat belong to each other. They can"t help it, she thinks, after having been through such a lot together."
"Dear old Grace!"
He had risen from his chair, and this time she made no effort to detain him. He seemed to have recovered his self-composure, and it struck her painfully, humiliatingly almost, that he should have spoken in that light way of the expedition to Fontainebleau on the morrow.... Well, men were different, she supposed; she remembered having felt that once before about Nick.
It was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: "But wait--wait! I"m not going to marry Strefford after all!"--but to do so would seem like an appeal to his compa.s.sion, to his indulgence; and that was not what she wanted. She could never forget that he had left her because he had not been able to forgive her for "managing"--and not for the world would she have him think that this meeting had been planned for such a purpose.
"If he doesn"t see that I am different, in spite of appearances... and that I never was what he said I was that day--if in all these months it hasn"t come over him, what"s the use of trying to make him see it now?"
she mused. And then, her thoughts hurrying on: "Perhaps he"s suffering too--I believe he is suffering-at any rate, he"s suffering for me, if not for himself. But if he"s pledged to Coral, what can he do? What would he think of me if I tried to make him break his word to her?"
There he stood--the man who was "going to Fontainebleau to-morrow"; who called it "taking the necessary steps!" Who could smile as he made the careless statement! A world seemed to divide them already: it was as if their parting were already over. All the words, cries, arguments beating loud wings in her dropped back into silence. The only thought left was: "How much longer does he mean to go on standing there?"
He may have read the question in her face, for turning back from an absorbed contemplation of the window curtains he said: "There"s nothing else?"
"Nothing else?"
"I mean: you spoke of things to be settled--"
She flushed, suddenly remembering the pretext she had used to summon him.
"Oh," she faltered, "I didn"t know... I thought there might be.... But the lawyers, I suppose...."
She saw the relief on his contracted face. "Exactly. I"ve always thought it was best to leave it to them. I a.s.sure you"--again for a moment the smile strained his lips--"I shall do nothing to interfere with a quick settlement."
She stood motionless, feeling herself turn to stone. He appeared already a long way off, like a figure vanishing down a remote perspective.
"Then--good-bye," she heard him say from its farther end.