“Right. But if you’ve deceived me, I’ll never trust you again. I promise.”
“Well, for as long as we are here I want you to spend at least one night in the week in town.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said he. “I don’t care an atom about my promise. Pish for my promise! And how will it relieve me? Oh, I see. But I shan’t—unless you come too, that’s to say.”
Silvia stopped.
“Now listen to me,” she said. “You enjoyed last night immensely. It’s perfectly natural that you should have. I should think you were ill if you hadn’t.”
“How do you know I enjoyed it? I never said so,” said he.
“You did better than that. You beamed all over your atrocious countenance when you told me about it. You were obliged to stop in town, and being obliged you found, and you know it perfectly well, that it was a sort of night out. You saw your friends: you had a beano.”
Silvia kept her finger on the cord of the blind she had chosen to pull down in her mind. She refused with a sublime intellectual dishonesty to look at the fact that Peter certainly could have come down here by dinner time if he had time to dine early in town; she would not see it. Already, so she told herself, she had once fallen into an owlishly stupid error and worse, by doubting him, by watching him; now at least she could repair that to some extent by the supreme honesty of trusting him without question. Something had happened to keep him in town, and it was no business of hers to think of that at all. He had said he was detained at the Foreign Office, and, for her, he was detained there. She held her eyes open to the intensest light of all, which was that of her own love, and the more it blinded her to everything else the better. It was only creatures like bats (and owls), things of the night, that were blinded by the dayspring.
“You enjoyed it: you had a beano,” she repeated. “Why not say so?”
Peter hesitated, but for a reason that she had refused to entertain the existence of. The fact, now shiningly clear, that Silvia had never so remotely seen that he could easily have got down here in time for dinner, made it unintelligibly and unreasonably needful for him to tell her so. There was something sordid in not doing so. Had she shown the smallest suspicion of it, he would probably have explained it away in some ingenious manner.