His look was uncomprehending; but she did not care. The anticipation of going out with him was now utterly absorbing her.
He waited with his hand on the gas-tap till she was ready, and then he lowered the gas.
"Wait a moment," she whispered at the door, and with a gesture called him back into the room from the flagged passage leading to the area steps.
On the desk was his evening glass of milk, which he drank cold in summer. She offered it to him in the twilit room like an enraptured handmaid. He had forgotten it. The fact that he had forgotten it and she had remembered it yet further increased her strange, mournful, ecstatic bliss.
"Have some," he whispered, when he had drunk.
She finished the glass, trembling. They went forth, climbing the area steps with proper precautions and escaping as thieves escape, down the street. For an instant she glimpsed the wide-open windows of the drawing-room, and the dining-room, from behind whose illuminated blinds came floating, as it were wistfully, the sound of song and chatter. She thought of Sarah Gailey prone and unconscious in the basement. And she felt the moisture of the milk on her lips. "Am I happy or unhappy?" she questioned herself, and could not reply. She knew only that she was thrillingly, smartingly alive.
At the corner of Preston Street and King's Road a landau waited.
"This is ours," said George casually.
"Ours?"
What a splendid masculine idea! How it proved that he too had been absorbed in the adventure! She admired him humbly, like a girl, like a little girl. With the most formal deference he helped her into the carriage.