"You mean that he's still anxious about Cicely?"
"Partly that—yes." She paused. "The child will get well, no doubt; but she is very lonely. She needs youth, heat, light. Mr. Langhope can't give her those, or even a semblance of them; and it's an art I've lost the secret of," she added with her shadowy smile.
Amherst's brows darkened. "I realize all she has lost——"
Mrs. Ansell glanced up at him quickly. "She is twice motherless," she said.
The blood rose to his neck and temples, and he tightened his hand on the arm of his chair. But it was a part of Mrs. Ansell's expertness to know when such danger signals must be heeded and when they might be ignored, and she went on quietly: "It's the question of the future that is troubling Mr. Langhope. After such an illness, the next months of Cicely's life should be all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such a child as one can match a ribbon. What she wants is spontaneous affection, not the most superlative manufactured article. She wants the sort of love that Justine gave her."
It was the first time in months that Amherst had heard his wife's name spoken outside of his own house. No one but his mother mentioned Justine to him now; and of late even his mother had dropped her enquiries and allusions, prudently acquiescing in the habit of silence which his own silence had created about him. To hear the name again—the two little syllables which had been the key of life to him, and now shook him as the turning of a rusted lock shakes a long-closed door—to hear her name spoken familiarly, affectionately, as one speaks of some one who may come into the room the next moment—gave him a shock that was half pain, and half furtive unacknowledged joy. Men whose conscious thoughts are mostly projected outward, on the world of external activities, may be more moved by such a touch on the feelings than those who are perpetually testing and tuning their emotional chords. Amherst had foreseen from the first that Mrs. Ansell might mean to speak of his wife; but though he had intended, if she did so, to cut their talk short, he now felt himself irresistibly constrained to hear her out.
Mrs. Ansell, having sped her shaft, followed its flight through lowered lashes, and saw that it had struck a vulnerable point; but she was far from assuming that the day was won.
"I believe," she continued, "that Mr. Langhope has said something of this to you already, and my only excuse for speaking is that I understood he had not been successful in his appeal."
No one but Mrs. Ansell—and perhaps she knew it—could have pushed so far beyond the conventional limits of discretion without seeming to overstep them by a hair; and she had often said, when pressed for the secret of her art, that it consisted simply in knowing the pass-word. That word once spoken, she might have added, the next secret was to give the enemy no time for resistance; and though she saw the frown reappear between Amherst's eyes, she went on, without heeding it: "I entreat you, Mr. Amherst, to let Cicely see your wife."
He reddened again, and pushed back his chair, as if to rise.