“I’m so glad, dear; so glad. If only you’ll always feel like that about me...” She stopped, hardly knowing what she said, and aghast at the idea that her own hands should have retied the knot she imagined to be broken. But she saw he had something more to say; something hard to get out, but absolutely necessary to express. He caught her hands, pulled her close, and, with his forehead drawn into its whimsical smiling wrinkles, “Look here,” he cried, “if Darrow wants to call me a damned ass too you’re not to stop him!”
It brought her back to a sharper sense of her central peril: of the secret to be kept from him at whatever cost to her racked nerves.
“Oh, you know, he doesn’t always wait for orders!” On the whole it sounded better than she’d feared.
“You mean he’s called me one already?” He accepted the fact with his gayest laugh. “Well, that saves a lot of trouble; now we can pass to the order of the day——” he broke off and glanced at the clock—“which is, you know, dear, that she’s starting in about an hour; she and Adelaide must already be snatching a hasty sandwich. You’ll come down to bid them good-bye?”
“Yes—of course.”
There had, in fact, grown upon her while he spoke the urgency of seeing Sophy Viner again before she left. The thought was deeply distasteful: Anna shrank from encountering the girl till she had cleared a way through her own perplexities. But it was obvious that since they had separated, barely an hour earlier, the situation had taken a new shape. Sophy Viner had apparently reconsidered her decision to break amicably but definitely with Owen, and stood again in their path, a menace and a mystery; and confused impulses of resistance stirred in Anna’s mind. She felt Owen’s touch on her arm. “Are you coming?”
“Yes ... yes ... presently.”
“What’s the matter? You look so strange.”
“What do you mean by strange?”
“I don’t know: startled—surprised.” She read what her look must be by its sudden reflection in his face.