"Oh, no," said Marjory.
Since her return from Dieppe she had seemed to "mind" nothing. Relaxation of the strain under which her days passed there had left her numbed. She was conscious only of a passionate shrinking from the sight or company of the two people who had there filled her life. To meet them again forced her back in thought to that dreary mysterious night with its unsolved riddle, that she feared seeking to answer.
Her mother had called on Maggie Dennison, and came back with a flow of kindly lamentations over Maggie's white cheeks and listless weary air. Her brother was constantly with Ruston, and tried to persuade her to join parties of which he was to be one. She fenced with both of them, escaping on one plea and another; and Maggie's acquiescence in her absence, no less than Ruston's failure to make a chance of meeting her, strengthened her resolve to remain aloof.
Young Sir Walter also came to dinner that night; he was very gay and chatty, full of Omofaga and his fast-approaching expedition. He greeted Evan Haselden with a manner that claimed at least equality; nay, he lectured him a little on the ignorant interference of a stay-at-home House of Commons with the work of the men on the spot, in South Africa and elsewhere; people on this side would not give a man a free hand, he complained, and exhorted Evan to take no part in such ill-advised meddling.
Hence he was led on to the topic he was never now far away from—Willie Ruston—and he reproached his mother and sister for their want of attention to the hero.
This was the first gleam of light for poor Evan Haselden, for it told him that Willie Ruston was not, as he had feared, a successful rival. He rejoiced at Lady Valentine's hinted dislike of Ruston, and anxiously studied Marjory's face in hope of detecting a like disposition. But his vanity led him to return Walter's lecture, and he added an innuendo concerning the unscrupulousness of adventurers who cloaked money-making under specious pretences. Walter flared up in a moment, and the dinner ended in something like a dispute between the two young men.
"Well, Dennison's found him out, anyhow," said Evan bitterly. "He's cut the whole concern."
"We can do without Dennison," said young Sir Walter scornfully.
When the meal was finished, young Sir Walter, treating his friend without ceremony, carelessly pleaded an engagement, and went out. Lady Valentine, interpreting Evan's glances, and hoping against hope, seized the chance of leaving him alone with her daughter. Marjory watched the manœuvre without thwarting it. Her heart was more dead to Evan than it had ever been. Her experiences at Dieppe had aged her mind, and she found him less capable of stirring any feeling in her than even in the days when she had half made a hero out of Willie Ruston.
She waited for his words in resignation; and he, acute enough to mark her moods, began as a man begins who rushes on anticipated defeat. What is unintelligible seems most irresistible, and he knew not at what point to attack her indifference. He saw the change in her; he could have dated its beginning. The cause he found somehow in Ruston, but yet it was clear to him that she did not think of Ruston as a suitor—almost clear that she heard his name and thought of him with repulsion—and that the attraction he had once exercised over her was gone.