“Do I? No wonder! You’ve given us all an exciting morning.”
He held to his point. “You’re more excited now that there’s no cause for it. What on earth has happened since I saw you?”
He looked about the room, as if seeking the clue to her agitation, and in her dread of what he might guess she answered: “What has happened is simply that I’m rather tired. Will you ask Sophy to come up and see me here?”
While she waited she tried to think what she should say when the girl appeared; but she had never been more conscious of her inability to deal with the oblique and the tortuous. She had lacked the hard teachings of experience, and an instinctive disdain for whatever was less clear and open than her own conscience had kept her from learning anything of the intricacies and contradictions of other hearts. She said to herself: “I must find out——” yet everything in her recoiled from the means by which she felt it must be done...
Sophy Viner appeared almost immediately, dressed for departure, her little bag on her arm. She was still pale to the point of haggardness, but with a light upon her that struck Anna with surprise. Or was it, perhaps, that she was looking at the girl with new eyes: seeing her, for the first time, not as Effie’s governess, not as Owen’s bride, but as the embodiment of that unknown peril lurking in the background of every woman’s thoughts about her lover? Anna, at any rate, with a sudden sense of estrangement, noted in her graces and snares never before perceived. It was only the flash of a primitive instinct, but it lasted long enough to make her ashamed of the darknesses it lit up in her heart...
She signed to Sophy to sit down on the sofa beside her. “I asked you to come up to me because I wanted to say good-bye quietly,” she explained, feeling her lips tremble, but trying to speak in a tone of friendly naturalness.
The girl’s only answer was a faint smile of acquiescence, and Anna, disconcerted by her silence, went on: “You’ve decided, then, not to break your engagement?”
Sophy Viner raised her head with a look of surprise. Evidently the question, thus abruptly put, must have sounded strangely on the lips of so ardent a partisan as Mrs. Leath! “I thought that was what you wished,” she said.
“What I wished?” Anna’s heart shook against her side. “I wish, of course, whatever seems best for Owen.... It’s natural, you must understand, that that consideration should come first with me...”
Sophy was looking at her steadily. “I supposed it was the only one that counted with you.”