"You'll do nothing until I see you."
"If you see me moderately soon," said Madame Beattie pleasantly. "Esther, are you coming?"
"No," said Esther, with a scrupulous politeness. "No, thank you. I shall walk."
But before she went, and well in the rear of the carriage, so that even Denny should not see, she gave Jeff one look, a suffused, appealing look that bade him remember how unhappy she was, how unprotected and, most of all, how feminine. She and the carriage also had in the next instant gone, and Jeff went stolidly back up the steps. There was sweat on his forehead and he drew his breath like a man dead-tired.
"My son," began the colonel.
"Don't," said Jeff shortly. He knew what his father would like to do: ask, in the sincerest sympathy, why Esther had come, discuss it and decide with him whether she was to come again and stay, whether it would be ill or well for him. The red mounted to the colonel's forehead, and Jeff put a hand on his shoulder. He couldn't help remembering that his father had called him "son" in a poignancy of sympathy all through the trials of the past, and it hurt to hear it now. It linked that time with this, as Madame Beattie, in her unabashed self-seeking, linked it. Perhaps he was never to escape. A prisoner, that was what he was. They were all prisoners, Madame Beattie to her squalid love of gain, Esther to her elementary love of herself, Lydia—he looked at her as she stood still in the background like a handmaid waiting. Why, Lydia was a prisoner, as he had thought before, only not, as he had believed then, to the glamour of love, but love, actual love for him, the kind that stands the stress of all the homely services and disillusioning. A smile broke over his face, and Lydia, incredulously accepting it, gave a little sob that couldn't be prevented in time, and took one dancing step. She ran up to the colonel, and pulled him away from Jeff. It seemed as if she were about to make him dance, too.
"Don't bother him, Farvie," said she. "He's out of prison! he's out of prison!"
She had said it, the cruel word, and Jeff knew she could not possibly have ventured it if she did not see in him something fortunate and free.