When Barrington called on the Professor next morning, he did not see Jehane. She had stayed in bed for breakfast, to keep out of his way. She did not trust herself to meet him before her parents because of her face—it might tell tales. She was strangely ashamed that anyone should know of her infatuation. And yet she longed to meet him that she might experience afresh the sweet tingling dread lest he should touch her. Ah, if she were sure that he returned her love, what a different Jehane he should discover....
Though she did not meet him, she espied him the moment he turned into the street. Peering stealthily from behind the curtain, she was glad to notice that he glanced up, as though conscious that her hidden eyes were watching. Listening at the head of the stairs, she heard his voice. She heard him inquire after her, and tried to estimate his disappointment and anxiety when her father answered casually, “The daughter has one of her headaches.... No, nothing much. She may not be down this morning.”
After he had left, she was angry with herself for her cowardice. She ought to have seized her opportunity. Perhaps he was returning at once to London, where he would quickly forget her. She might never see him again.
By a kind of necromancy she tried to arrive at certainty as to whether or no he would marry her. If she could count a hundred before a cart passed a particular lamppost, then he would become her husband. When the cart went too fast for her counting, she skipped numbers and cheated in order to make the test propitious. Sitting in her bedroom, partly dressed, with the brilliant summer sunshine streaming over her, she invented all kinds of similar experiments.
At last she grew impatient of her own company and came downstairs to lunch. Her dreamy mother, who usually noticed nothing, embarrassed her by remarking that her face was flushed as though she were sickening for something. She turned attention from herself by inquiring the result of her father’s interview with Mr. Barrington.
Her father was annoyed because his book had been delayed in publication—quite unwarrantably delayed, he said. She could not get him to state whether Barrington had gone back to London. The conversation developed into an indictment of the innate trickiness of publishers. Mrs. Usk had never been able to reconcile the place she occupied in the world of letters with the smallness of her royalty-statements. It almost made her doubt the financial honesty of some persons. Jehane had listened with angry eyes while these two impractical scholars, comfortably interrupting one another across the table, swelled out the sum of their grievances. Now she took up the cudgels so personally and so passionately in the defense of publishers in general, and Barrington in particular, that she was moved to tears by her eloquence.
Her parents peered at her out of their dim eyes in concerned silence. When the tears had come, they nodded at each other, bleating in chorus, “She is not well. She is flushed. She is certainly sickening for something. She must go to bed. The doctor must be summoned.”
Jehane pushed back her chair. “You’ll do nothing of the kind. I’m quite well.”
After she had made her escape, it was discovered that she had eaten nothing. In a few minutes she reappeared in her out-door attire and announced that she was going to Cassingland.
“But, my dear, you can’t,” her mother protested; “not in your state. You may give it to Nan; it may be catching. And then, think how Mr. Tudor would blame us.”