"Mr. Spencer?" she repeated.
"Yes, my lady."
Marie turned away from the man without replying, and walked a pace or two from him. Her mind seemed to be making itself up without any volition on her part. Then, without turning her head, "Ask him to come out," she answered, and the sound of the utterly commonplace words conveyed to her the nature of her own decision; for she had yielded, and knew it, not to be the imperative demand of her pride, which insisted that she should show not the smallest change of behaviour towards him, just because people had lied about her, but to her imperative desire to see the man.
She walked back to where the tea-table still stood, with the shining points of sunlight that filtered through the cedar making stars on the silver, and sat there a moment listening with a sort of incredulous wonder to the hammer of her pulse, and observing with the same incapacity for belief that these were her hands which trembled. But the interval was a short one, for in a moment his step sounded crisp on the terrace, and then became noiseless on the lawn. She was sitting with her back to the quarter of advance, but turned her head as he approached.
"Where in the world have you sprung from?" she asked. "Have some tea, Jim, or whisky-and-soda? I am delighted to see you, though it was not in my programme to see anybody."
"I am an intruder then, I fear," said he. "No sugar, thanks."
"Yes, but not unwelcome. I left London three days ago, and am going back to-morrow. I am eccentric, as you know, and, what is more useful, I have the reputation of being so. Thus, nobody wonders if I disappear for a few days."
To her great relief and her hardly less surprise, Marie found not the slightest difficulty in assuming a perfectly natural manner, and even mentally classed it under the heading of phenomena which show that ordinary people in trying circumstances for the most part behave normally. It was natural to her, in fact, to be natural. But even as she drew these comforting conclusions, she had leisure to observe that Jim, too, was in the grip of some inward struggle. Its nature she did not try to guess, but continued talking under a sense of stress, a fear of silences.
"You know my gospel, do you not?" she said, "or, rather, I am sure you do not, as I have only formulated it to myself during this last day or two. There are two halves to the world, which make the whole, and each is the antidote to the other. One half is people; the other half is things. Now, the country is the place of things, and London of people. Cows, flowers, hay, all these are a certain antidote to the poisoning which unmixed people give one. In the same way, one flies from the country to town to take the antidote to the poison, a narcotic one, of things. Dipsomaniacs, so to speak, live entirely in London. They die young; it is a quick poison. The opposite dipsomaniacs live entirely in the country; it is a slow poison, and they live, or, at any rate, do not die, until a very advanced age. But oh, Jim, what a difference there is between living and not dying! They sound the same thing, but there is all the difference in the world between them."
Jim stirred his sugarless tea slowly, then drank it quickly and put down the cup. Being a man, airy nothings were not part of his stock in trade, a deficiency from a merely social standpoint.