“He may be there—I think he is there.”
“Well—the maid would come to the door. Besides—if he did—what more simple than to shake his hand and say good-bye to you both?”
She said quietly, “We shall not see you again—for how long?”
“Oh, it will be quite natural that I should now go under for some years,” Geoffrey answered as quietly. “Some day, when you and Maurice feel like seeing me——“
“Yes; some day,” Felicia answered, with her head again out of the window.
His dull ache of misery had been so steady that he was surprised to find it capable of a deeper pang. He had almost the impulse to ask her if her quiet were wrung from such agony as his. The next moment he was hating himself for the whimpering selfishness that could not feel gladness for her fortitude. Yet the plaint was there, and it dimly guessed at a woman’s capacity, strange in its sanity, its acceptance of compromise, for two lives; her absorption in response to the claim that she may listen to. He himself had helped to lock her into that smaller room of her heart and now she must live in it, since the high and beautiful chambers were closed to her for ever. In the smaller room, too, was the love cruelly wounded, wounded by her hand. Her whole nature was now an eagerness to staunch, uplift, console.
The cab drew up before the block of flats, and while Geoffrey, saying that he would walk back to his rooms, paid the man, Felicia went inside and rang beside the lift for the porter. Geoffrey had joined her when the man appeared.
Yes, he said, Mr. Wynne had come back that afternoon. No, Mr. Wynne had not been out again, though he had sent the maid away soon after arriving. He knew that he had not gone out for he had been sitting in the hall all day.
There had evidently been talk, Geoffrey saw. Felicia saw nothing, thought of nothing but Maurice’s presence above; her heart seemed choked in its beating. She made no objection to Geoffrey following her into the lift.
They stepped out together and, before the foolishly decorative little door that Maurice had so often jested over they paused, the porter still lingering.