"Yes, dear; I quite understand," said Mrs. Hancock. "He saw you were practising. Did he say he would come back? If so, I need not send this note!"
It all seemed like a plot of the Inquisition.
"No, he said nothing," remarked Elizabeth rather shortly, feeling that this perfectly straightforward visit was somehow becoming suspicious.
"Did he stop long?" asked Edith, quite casually.
"No, five minutes—ten, perhaps," said Elizabeth. "I really did not time him."
Mrs. Hancock always kept a feather in a small vase of water on her writing-table. With this she smeared the gum on the flap of envelopes in preference to the more ordinary use of the tongue on such occasions. It seemed to her slightly indelicate to put out her tongue—even the tip of it—in public; and besides, who knew what the gum was made of or who had been touching it? This genteel observance singularly annoyed Elizabeth, and it was her privilege to snatch away envelopes from her aunt and lick them herself, with, so to speak, yards of tongue protruding, rather than allow the use of the horrible feather. Here she saw her opportunity, and with a complete resumption of her natural manner, which up to that moment had not been a complete success, upset the feather's water and brought an end to the senseless catechism.
Lind was obliging enough to take the note himself, and prepared for this expedition of about forty yards by putting on a cap, a mackintosh, and goloshes, and providing himself with an umbrella. There was need only for a verbal answer, but he waited some five minutes before an acceptance came. By this time the rain had completely ceased, but Edward, from his window, saw him put up his umbrella again—no doubt to guard against drippings from the trees. He observed this with a very minute detached feeling of interest. Then he sprang up to call to Lind and substitute "regrets" for his "delight." Then that impulse died also, and he sat down to think over what had happened.
He did not fall into the mistake of considering it a little thing, though the incident in itself was nothing. It was, at the least, a feather of carded cloud high up in the heavens, that told, though so insignificant and remote a thing, of the great wind that blew there. He had not spoken idly; rather, he scarcely knew that he had spoken at all until his own words sounded in his ears. He had not addressed pretty words to a pretty girl; it seemed to him that they had been squeezed, as it were, by some force infinitely superior to his power of will out of his resisting mouth. His whole conduct, from the chance hearing of the Brahms' intermezzo in his garden, leading on to his ill-bred and silent intrusion into the room where Elizabeth played and his words, all seemed to have been dictated by an irresistible power that arose out of the sense of his incarnate dream. It had been perfectly true that for the last fortnight he had thought of nothing else but her, that the affairs of every day had for him moved like shadows across that solid background.... In the meantime he had promised his substance and his life to one of the shadows, and, as far as he knew or guessed, he was nothing more than a shadow, rather a distasteful one, to the girl who for him was the only reality.
Then the practical side of the situation, the "what next" which always hastens to stir the boiling pottage of our emotions with its bony fingers, held his attention, even as it had held Elizabeth's. He came to the same conclusions, but with an important reservation. She had consigned the whole affair to complete oblivion, whether or no the consignment lay in her power; he was as glad as she to consign it also, until and unless, in legal phrase, something modified the existing conditions. He knew very well what he connoted by that modification: it meant some sign, some signal from Elizabeth that should confirm the secret welcome that her amazement had so instantly smothered. Just now he had told himself that he was but a distasteful shadow to her; now again the remembrance of her soul's leap towards him told that he was not that. Yet he had had no right to see that smothered welcome any more than he had a right to intrude himself privately into her presence. But in his heart of hearts he was ashamed of neither feat. Only his surface, his sense of breeding, his respect for things like conduct and convention rebuked him. He himself, the seer of dreams, cared not at all; rather, he hugged himself on it.
He had drifted away from practical considerations and wrenched himself back to them. On the eighth of October next, as matters stood, he was to be married to Edith, and his conduct—again with that reservation—must be framed on the lines demanded by that condition. He felt no doubt whatever that Elizabeth would breathe no word of what had passed to her aunt or Edith, for, if she did so, it would imply wanton mischief on her part, of which he knew her to be incapable, or the determination to stop his marriage for—for other reasons.... She would only speak if she intended to spoil or to stop. She might, it was very likely that she would, interpose between herself and him that screen of manner, invisible as a sheet of glass, which yet cuts off all rays of heat from a fire, while it suffers to pass through it the sparkle of its brightness. She would probably appear to others to shine on him as before, but he, poor shivering wretch, would know that all warmth had been cut off from him.