Several times during the progress of dinner, I found that Roche was looking at me with anxious interest; and once or twice he came to my rescue with unexpected tact, by quietly changing my plate as quickly as possible, so that my uncle should not see how little I had eaten of what he had sent me.
Dinner was longer, and Uncle Dominick more determinately talkative, than usual; but at last there came a break in his harangue, and I took advantage of it to make my escape into the drawing-room. I sat for a long time over the fire by myself, lying in an armchair without any wish to move. I felt as if I had sunk to the bottom of a deep sea, whose waves were rushing and surging over my head, and I wondered dully if this was what people felt like when they were going to have a bad illness. My mind kept stupidly repeating one short sentence, “Let me say good-bye! Let me say good-bye!” They were the last words I had seen of Nugent’s letter as it curled up in the flame of the library fire, and they now beat to and fro in my brain with sing-song monotony.
I believe I must have dozed, for the noise of the door opening aroused me with a shivering start. Willy came into the room with a newspaper in his hand, and, sitting down at the other side of the fire without speaking to me, began to read it. I fell back in my chair again, waiting till the striking of ten o’clock should give me a reasonable excuse for going to bed. The crackling of Willy’s newspaper and the sleepy tick of the clock were the only sounds in the room. I had never before seen Willy read a newspaper so attentively, and I watched him with languid interest from under my half-closed eyelids, while he steadily made his way through it. Now he had turned it inside out, and was reading the advertisements; certainly it did not take much to amuse him. Could he have felt, on that day after the dance, as dead to all the things that used to interest him as I did now?
It was only four evenings ago since I had listened miserably to the passionate words which I had not been able to prevent him from saying; he must have forgotten them already, or how else could he sit there with such stolid composure? If he could recover his equanimity in four days, perhaps in a week I should have begun to forget that persistent sentence which still kept pace with my thoughts.
The dining-room door opened and shut with a loud bang, and I heard the sound of uncertain footsteps crossing the hall. The crackling of the newspaper ceased, and a sudden rigidity in Willy’s attitude showed me that he was listening. The step paused outside the door, and then, after some preliminary rattling, the handle was turned. Willy jumped up and walked quickly to the door, as if with the intention of stopping whoever was there from coming in. Before he reached it, however, it opened, and I saw that it was his father whose entrance he had been trying to prevent.
“It’s not worth while your coming in, sir,” he said; “Theo’s awfully tired, and she’s going to bed.”
“Tired! what right has she to be tired?” said my uncle, loudly, coming into the room as he spoke. He put his hand on Willy’s shoulder and pushed him to one side. “Get out of my way! Why should I not come in if I like?”
He walked very slowly and deliberately to the fireplace, and stood on the rug with his back to the fire, swinging a little backwards and forwards from his toes to his heels. There was some difference in his manner and appearance which I could not account for. His face was ghastly white; a scant lock of iron-grey hair hung over his forehead; and the dark rings I had seen about his eyes in the morning had now changed to a purplish red.
“And what have you two been doing with yourselves all the evening? Making the most of your time, Willy, I hope? Perhaps that was why you tried to keep me out just now?”
He began to laugh at what he had said in a way very unusual with him.