She said nothing to this for a moment, but then replied, as though she had really thought it over: “Not to-night; Cicely won’t get back in time. Her poor woman is dying; she couldn’t leave her. But to-morrow; I intend to go to-morrow; with Cicely.”
“Leaving me here?” he enquired, with something of his own dryness, so that, again with the faint, defensive smile, she said: “Oh—you must come with us; we will all go together; as far as London. We are going down to Cornwall, Bevis, to some cousins of Cicely’s near Fowey.”
He came then, after a little silence, and leaned at the other end of the mantelpiece. “What’s the matter, Tony?” he asked. He had not, in his worst imaginings, imagined this. She had never before spoken as though they were, definitely, to go different ways. And she stood looking down into the fire as if she could not meet his eyes. “You see,” he said, but he felt it to be useless, “I was right about that wretched table business. It’s that that has made you ill.”
“Yes; it’s because of that,” she said.
“You must let me talk to you about it,” he went on. “I can explain it all, I think.”
“It is explained,” she said. Her voice was cold and gentle, cold, it seemed to him, with the immensity of some blank vastness of distance that divided them. And a cold presage fell upon him, of what he could not say; or would not.
“You would not explain it as I would,” he said. “You must listen to me and not to Miss Latimer.”
“It is all explained, Bevis,” she repeated. “It was true. What it said was true.”
“How do you mean, true?” he asked, and he heard the presage in his voice.
“He is there,” she said, and now he knew why she was far from him, and what the stillness was that wrapped her round. “He comes. Cicely has seen him. She saw him there that night. Beside the fountain.”