He laughed again. "What makes you feel that?" he asked, feeling all the while the complete absurdity of such fencing.
"When I ran out I noticed somebody. He was reading a newspaper and I couldn't see him. But he just moved it a bit, and I seemed to catch sight of the top of his head. And when I got into the street I said to myself, 'It looked like George Cannon,' and then I said, 'Of course it couldn't be.' And then with this business about Auntie Hamps the idea went right out of my head."
"Well, it is, if you want to know."
Her mysterious body and face seemed to radiate a disastrous emotion that filled the whole office.
"Did you know he was coming?"
"I did not. Hadn't the least notion!" The sensation of criminality began to leave Edwin. As Hilda seemed to move and waver, he added:
"Now you aren't going to see him!"
And his voice menacingly challenged her, and defied her to stir a step. The most important thing in the world, then, was that Hilda should not see George Cannon. He would stop her by force. He would let himself get angry and brutal. He would show her that he was the stronger. He had quite abandoned his earlier attitude of unsentimental callousness which argued that after all it wouldn't ultimately matter whether they encountered each other or not. Far from that, he was, so it appeared to him, standing between them, desperate and determined, and acting instinctively and conventionally. Their separate pasts, each full of grief and tragedy, converged terribly upon him in an effort to meet in just that moment, and he was ferociously resisting.
"What does he want?"
"He wants me to help him to go to America."