What went through his brain at that moment, with the sureness of a surgeon’s incision, was just that which Nellie had said when he told her that he was intending to ask Silvia to marry him. He had hedged that with the reservation that he would do so when he thought that he had a chance of success, and witch-like, with swift incontinent prophecy, she had told him that it was rather late already as regards to-night. The prophecy had been encouraging at the time, but not convincing. Now he suddenly felt himself convinced. Why or how—their conversation had only been about Nellie—he did not know. But it seemed that Nellie had penetrated where he had not....
There was his father sitting on the sofa beside Mrs. Wardour; there was his mother veiled and shrouded from him as she had ever been, doing something with a teapot, doing something with crumbs left on plates, for which she made some concoction, placed in the balcony outside, for birds.... Had he been alone with Silvia, he would have proposed to her, fortified with Nellie’s encouragement, fortified even more by his present sense of its reliability, then and there. But unless he knelt on the floor to her, as he had found his father doing when he came in....
“Oh, what did Nellie say to you last night?” asked the girl. “Let’s collect evidence, as you say.”
“And have her burned outside St. Margaret’s, instead of letting her marry Philip inside?” suggested Peter.
Silvia gave a parenthetic gasp.
“I suggested that she ought to be burned, too,” she said. “More evidence, please.”
Peter found her entrancing at that moment. There was some keen boyish kind of frank enthusiasm about her that attacked and challenged instead of merely provoking. She asked for no effort: you only had to allow yourself to be caught up.
“But it’s your turn,” he said. “You first suggested that Nellie told you things you didn’t know.”
“No; it was you who said that.”
“It may have been; but it was you who suggested the witch-like quality. You said that she makes you see what she has seen. You know you did.”