As I walked up the drive—a broad shingle walk, so called because it enables Quin's car to come immediately to the front door—I was thinking of all that had taken place that morning; trying to justify it in my mind with any reasonable scheme of things however remote. To what purpose had I heard that story in the restaurant? With what object had that poor child of ill-fortune been induced to shelter in the very doorway which I must pass? Or, granting that as reasonable enough, why had she spoken to me—and, speaking, why had she appealed to me for charity? There were many things she might have said, less calculated to catch my sympathy than to ask me for her cab fare home—things at which I should have hurried by rather than hear. But no—she had caught the moment's speculation of my mind and, out of my conversation with her, had grown the belief that I was meant to save Clarissa from destruction.
Lunch was not ready yet, for I could see Cruikshank still in the garden, wherefore I stood there for some minutes in the drive, trying to puzzle it out, to fit it into some logical order of events upon such lines as you might expect so complicated a matter to be planned. But it would not go. A set of beads there was, a thread too whereon to string them. But with all the wishing in the world, I could not make a pattern bringing the faintest understanding to my mind.
I knew, as truly as the Fate which had brought them together, that nothing but misery and disillusionment could come of Clarissa's union with that boy in London. But I had failed to persuade her to go back to Dominica without him. How utterly I had failed, no one but I, who know how truly I had hoped for it, can ever realize. Then why had the little nursery maid ever induced in me a mood? Why had my mood been played upon by that story in the restaurant? Why had the story been visualized to me by the meeting with that little creature in the doorway? In a word, why, in the name of God, had I come to Ireland at all?
What I can have done as I put that final question to myself, I do not know. Some gesticulation I must have made; some movement which had betrayed my thoughts and the utter despondency of my mind. Whatever it could have been, I was made suddenly conscious of Bellwattle's voice calling to me from the window of her bedroom.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
I looked up, and found her standing at the window drying her hands.
"What should be the matter?" said I, and I came to take my stand below the window, looking up.
"Why that terrible sigh?" she inquired, "on a day like this?"
"I wasn't aware of it," I replied.
"It's all the worse for that. Is something the matter?"