“She has met you?” I asked, thinking ruefully of George Ward, now on the high seas in the pleasant company of old hopes renewed.
“She has let me meet her. And to-day we lunched at the inn at Dives and then walked by the sea all afternoon. She gave me the whole day—the whole day! You see”—he began to pace again—“you see I was right, and you were wrong. She wasn’t offended—she was glad—that I couldn’t help speaking to her; she has said so.”
“Do you think,” I interrupted, “that she would wish you to tell me this?”
“Ah, she likes you!” he said so heartily, and appearing meanwhile so satisfied with the completeness of his reply, that I was fain to take some satisfaction in it myself. “What I wanted most to say to you,” he went on, “is this: you remember you promised to tell me whatever you could learn about her—and about her husband?”
“I remember.”
“It’s different now. I don’t want you to,” he said. “I want only to know what she tells me herself. She has told me very little, but I know when the time comes she WILL tell me everything. But I wouldn’t hasten it. I wouldn’t have anything changed from just THIS!”
“You mean—”
“I mean the way it IS. If I could hope to see her every day, to be in the woods with her, or down by the shore—oh, I don’t want to know anything but that!”
“No doubt you have told her,” I ventured, “a good deal about yourself,” and was instantly ashamed of myself. I suppose I spoke out of a sense of protest against Mrs. Harman’s strange lack of conventionality, against so charming a lady’s losing her head as completely as she seemed to have lost hers, and it may have been, too, out of a feeling of jealousy for poor George—possibly even out of a little feeling of the same sort on my own account. But I couldn’t have said it except for the darkness, and, as I say, I was instantly ashamed.
It does not whiten my guilt that the shaft did not reach him.