The girl turns away from him, in so far that only her profile now can be seen, whilst her right hand has caught hold of the back of a chair near her, as if for support.
‘But why?’ asks she, in a low tone. ‘Mrs. Moriarty likes me to be here.’
‘But, you see,’ says Wyndham gravely, ‘it is my house, and not Mrs. Moriarty’s.’
‘Yes.’ She looks at him as if hardly understanding, but presently an expression grows upon her face that gives him to know that she thinks him churlish.
‘It is quite a big house,’ says she.
There is a pause—a pause in which he tells himself that evidently up to this she had been accustomed to houses of very cramped limits. The Circular Road in Dublin would supply such houses, built for respectable artisans and clerks in commercial places, and the best of the decent strata that cover the earth and are of the earth earthy. The Circular Road, or some other road, has no doubt supplied the kind of house to which the girl has been accustomed—this girl, with her pale patrician face and her singular strength of mind. It is she who at last breaks the silence. ‘There is plenty of room for me,’ says she.
‘I know—of course I know that,’ says Wyndham hurriedly. ‘But then, you see, it—it wouldn’t do, you see.’
He looks deliberately at her, as if to explain his meaning, but, nothing coming of the look, he falls back once more upon facts.
‘I come here sometimes,’ says he.
‘Yes; Mrs. Denis told me that,’ says the girl. ‘But’—eagerly—‘I shouldn’t be in the way at all. I could stay in that little room belonging to Mrs. Denis—that little room off the kitchen.’