“It is Mrs. Lewin, sir, she said she must see you for a minute.”
“Ask her to come in here,” said Gregory, turning his back suddenly upon the man. He looked at the open window half as if he would have closed it, and at the shaded light half as if he would have extinguished it, for his face was out of control. Even when he turned round to meet his visitor, he offered her his hand in silence, and she was vaguely surprised that he seemed to have suddenly gone bloodless. The big veins swelled on his temples though, and his eyes looked sunken and cavernous. She heard the door shut slowly, and fancied that the servant who had admitted her shared her curiosity and would fain have lingered. All personal feeling and sense of embarrassment had been swept from her mind by the events which had overwhelmed her in the last few hours, and she did not remember that she had not really met the man standing before her since his hand had rested on hers at the picnic. She was not an impulsive woman, and yet it had been impulse that had made her send Ally to Maitso, impulse that had made her wait feverishly for the moment of his departure, that had hurried her feet along the familiar garden and through the grounds of Government House the instant his pony’s hoofs died away down the hill. She was devoured by a desire to know why Gregory had done her this ill turn, and was sending her husband to certain failure, for he knew Alaric’s incapacity as well as she. It was impulse now that drove her forward a step towards him, and made her voice low and hurried as she spoke straight to him without any more formal greeting.
“Why have you done this? Are you mad? What has made you send him to Port Cecil instead of to Sir Geoffrey?”
He was looking at her with his long, hard stare, taking in every line of her white figure in its feminine softness and beauty. Her hair was waved back from her forehead more than usual, as if she had pushed it there in her impatient thought, and beneath her delicate drawn brows her velvet eyes were alight as if with pain. He felt stupid with passion, and remembered with a curious thrill the occasion on which he had seen her in her nightdress, her hair thrown back from her forehead with much the same effect, and the same strained look in her eyes—it seemed that her husband was always the cause of her looking so.
She had taken a step forward. He took one also, and they stood close together, with nothing to hinder their direct gaze into each other’s faces. His whispering voice was horribly audible, and yet suppressed as he answered her.
“Mrs. Lewin, you have asked me to do my best for your husband, and give him a chance if Government referred to me to recommend him. I am giving him a chance. What reason have you to complain?”
She threw out her hands with a little movement of desperation, almost as if she would have seized his arm and shaken him. “Oh, don’t lie, now!” she exclaimed. “Tell me the truth—the truth! You know he may ruin himself if he goes without me. Why did you not send us to this other appointment that was put in your hands? If you had mentioned his name, instead of Captain Nugent’s, to Sir Geoffrey Vaughan, we should have been moved from here together. Why did you not do it?”
He did not ask her how she had known of his private letter from the old general. He stood and looked at her still, and moistened his lips as if he could hardly speak. She saw his tongue touch them like a wicked snake before the words would come. He bent a little more towards her, and his lidless eyes probed hers mercilessly.
“Because I could not part from you!” he said distinctly, and yet he seemed to speak without a real note in his voice.
She fell back in exactly the same mechanical way that she had gone forward, and her eyes blinked before his as if before too strong a light. Very slowly she lifted her pretty hands and laid them over her breast as if with an unconscious effort to quiet the throbbing of the pulses there. He had not moved; but her voice was almost as toneless as his, when she spoke, from utter terror.