“Why should I? Unless you’ll talk about yours, too. What you mean, I suppose, is that you miss pleading and passion in me and would like to see them displayed. I quite understand that in you. Perhaps it’s what’s needed to bring you round. But I’m not that sort of person. I couldn’t do it naturally. I think, though you miss it in me, you’d not really find it natural, either. We’re too clever, too civilized, I suppose.”
“I suppose we are,” she conceded, though a little wistfully. “I don’t exactly miss it. I know it’s there. It’s merely that I’d like you to talk about it, even if you don’t display it.”
“I’m glad you recognize that it’s there,” said the young man.
“Shall I tell you what I really feel about the window?” Antonia now asked. Her back was to it as she sat, and its great cedar, cutting against the pale blue sky, made a distant background to her head. Like a Renaissance portrait, sombre, serene, splendid in tone, the picture she made was before him; an allegorical figure of poetry, youth or melancholy, with its dwelling eyes and spacings dark and pale. He was often to see her afterwards as she then looked across at him.
“We never lived at Wyndwards, you know, Malcolm and I,” she said, “though Malcolm, of course, spent his life here until we married. But we visited his mother, often, and I never thought about the window then. It was only after Malcolm’s death, and hers; when I stayed here alone for the first time; a year ago. Alone except for Cicely.”
“Miss Latimer has always lived here, hasn’t she?” Captain Saltonhall inquired.
“Yes. But she is so much a part of it that it was like being alone. I used to walk up and down here and look out. Just a year ago it was; spring like this. And, as I walked, I found that while I loved looking out of the front windows, I shrank, I couldn’t tell why, from looking out of the third; the end one.” Antonia turned herself still farther in her chair, leaning both elbows on the wide arm. “I shrank from it, yet it drew me, too. And when I yielded, and looked, I felt frightened. And one day it came over me, as I looked out, that what I feared was that I should see Malcolm standing there, beside the fountain.” Her voice had dropped. Her eyes dwelt on him, full of their genuine distress.
“Ah, I see.” Captain Saltonhall nodded. “That was very natural, I think.”
“Why natural?”
“He had died so shortly before. Your thoughts were full of him. The place is full of him—with all the years he lived here.”