“Which you never gave me any further opportunity of going on with.”
The statement took my breath away. For some seconds I could only stare at her as a truthful man stares when he hears himself given the lie direct.
“Did you—did you—want to go on with it?” I managed to stammer at last.
“What do you think?”
“I—I didn’t think that. I waited nearly two hours.”
“And if you’d only waited a few minutes more—”
I leaned down toward her, breaking in on her words with a sense of what I might have lost: “Everything would have been different? You were going to say that?”
She took time to raise her hands and adjust the yashmak, giving me the clue to her reason for wearing it. It was putting on a vizor before going into battle. Knowing that she would be thrown into some difficult situations, she had taken this method of being as far as possible screened against embarrassment.
She was successful in that. Apart from the shifting surface fire of her eyes and the slightest possible tremor in her voice I saw no rift in the barricade of her composure.
“No; that isn’t what I was going to say. I don’t know how things would have been. I suppose they would have been as—as they are now.”