“Very well, now,” she said. “Not before, for you had not come.”
“I have been here all the evening,” said Hugh, as coolly as he could, for her sweet face lifted to his actually stirred his steady pulses, and he rebelled against these new, involuntary sensations. “I must go, now. Good-bye! I am glad you are looking so well.”
“You will stay? Just a little while?” she pleaded.
“I am sorry that I cannot possibly do so,” he said. “My time is not my own.”
Her blank look of disappointment startled him. What was this violent fancy of hers for him? Was he wise, was he, indeed, doing right to encourage it? He began to fear that he had taken some dangerous step on that flowery way to destruction that he had hitherto succeeded in avoiding.
Still, as he argued to himself walking home under the calm night sky, why should he think there was anything approaching to danger in the kindly feeling this young, beautiful creature entertained for him?
“I am absurdly vain to think of such a thing,” he told himself with a scornful laugh. “I, more than middle-aged, white-haired, awkward, stupid in women’s society, she can only feel a mixture of pity and confidence. How absurd it is of me to make a mountain out of a molehill!”
He went to bed with a heavy heart, accusing himself of ingratitude to the princess.
“I ought to feel flattered at it all, I suppose,” he said when he awoke, his spirits oppressed with the feeling of something going wrong in his life. Instead of this, he felt utterly wretched.
Had he expected to hear from Mercedes? He did not know. He only knew that he turned over his letters with a sense of disappointment, and although he talked with Mrs. Mervyn about the opera, and listened to her and to Ralph’s hints of some pleasant surprise in store for him in the arrangements at the Pinewood, he could not have given an account of the conversation afterwards had his life depended upon it. He had hard work to concentrate his energies upon his work that day. When he returned home he found a letter—a letter with the Andriocchi arms on the flap of the envelope, with his name in that graceful, sloping writing.