Just before the closing of the door, which must certainly be that of Mrs. Heaton’s bedroom, Nellie had said: “I’ll put out the lights; good night, dear. What a lovely last rubber,” and Peter, feeling his way, so to speak, into Nellie’s mind by the analogy of his own, knew exactly what she was doing. In a moment now there would be the click of the extinguished light in the hall, and she would very softly rustle back in the dark into the room where he was sitting, close the door of that, and then, perhaps, turn on the light inside again, or, as likely as not, shuffle back into the window-seat. So often had they sat there talking in the dark.
And as he waited for those five or ten seconds to pass, he was invaded by a sense of passionate rebellion against himself. There was the girl, whom for the last two years he had been interested in, fond of to the practical exclusion of anyone else, and now, at this moment she, engaged to a man whom she did not ever so remotely love, was presently stealing back, on the eve of her marriage, to spend a more than midnight hour with him. He ought to have been a balloon, rising into some stratum of sunlight high above the twi-lit earth, and instead he was bumping heavily over uneven ground, quite unable to get into the air. No matter what the ballast of worldly consideration he threw out, he could not feel himself lifting, and Nellie, when she came back, would only add to the weight.
His expectations were ruthlessly, even ruefully, fulfilled. She stole in, invisible in the darkened oblong of the doorway, closed it, and without turning up the light, established herself in the window-seat again.
“Mother’s gone to her room,” she said. “I did it so cleverly, Peter. I said I had just come in——”
“I know; I heard,” said Peter. “Brilliant.”
“Wasn’t it? Now we can talk without any fear of interruption. Where had we got to? Oh, I know. I think Silvia is perfectly fascinating. Don’t you?”
Here was the bumping process, the added weight. Eager though Nellie had been to re-establish old relations between herself and him, there was a livelier eagerness to ascertain anything about new relations between himself and Silvia. If Nellie, as he had affirmed, had shut his windows and bolted his doors for him, he now made a tour of the secure premises to see that she had done her work thoroughly.
“I don’t know if I should say perfectly fascinating,” he said.
“But you like her, don’t you?”
“Extremely, but——”