As I stooped to take the hand she held up languidly I tried to search her eyes. They told me nothing. The fire in them seemed not exactly to have gone out, but to have been hidden behind some veil of film through which one could get nothing but a glow. Had she meant to baffle me she couldn’t have done it more effectively; but, as I learned later, she meant nothing of the kind. Her greeting, as far as I could judge of it, was precisely that which she would have accorded to any other diner-out.
During the exchange of commonplaces that ensued there were two things I noticed with curiosity and uneasiness. She wore the string of pearls I had seen once before—had had in my pocket, as a matter of fact—and the long diamond bar-pin. As to her rings I could not be sure, having on the night when I meant to steal them noticed nothing but their number. But the pearls and the diamonds arrested my attention—and my questionings. Was she wearing them on purpose? Was she holding them up as silent reminders between her and me? Was I to understand from merely looking at them the charge her eyes refused to convey?
I had no means of seeking an answer to these questions, because Coningsby came in and the process of being welcomed had to be gone through again. Moreover, the commonplaces which, when carried on à deux, might have led to something more personal remained as commonplaces and no more when tossed about à quatre.
On our going in to dinner the same tone was maintained, and I learned nothing from any interchange of looks. There was, in fact, no interchange of looks. Miss Barry talked to her right and to her left, but rarely across the table. When it became necessary to speak a word directly to me she did it with so hasty a glance that it might easily not have been a glance at all. The burning eyes that had watched me so intently on our first meeting, and studied me with so much laughing curiosity on our second, kept themselves hidden. Since it was on them that I had reckoned to tell me what I was so eager to be sure of, I was like a man who hopes to look through a window and finds it darkened by curtains.
After dinner, however, I got an opportunity. Coningsby and his wife were summoned to the nursery to discuss the manifestations of some childish ailment. Miss Barry and I being left alone before the fire, I was able to say, “Well, have you thought of it?”
Some of the customary vivacity returned to her lips and eyes. She had at no time seemed unkindly—only absent and rather dreamy. She was rather dreamy still, but more on the spot mentally.
“Thought of what?”
“Of—of where we first met.”
“Oh, that! I’m sorry to say I’ve been too busy to do any searching in my memory. But one of these days I must.”
There was no mistaking the sincerity of her tone. She had not searched in her memory; she had not considered it worth while. Her interest in our meeting at the memorial had probably passed before she had driven away.