“You promised to let me hear from you now and then,” he began awkwardly, and with a sharp sense of his awkwardness.
A faint smile made her face more tragic. “Did I? There was nothing to tell. I’ve had no history—like the happy countries...”
He waited a moment before asking: “You are happy here?”
“I was,” she said with a faint emphasis.
“Why do you say ‘was’? You’re surely not thinking of going? There can’t be kinder people anywhere.” Darrow hardly knew what he was saying; but her answer came to him with deadly definiteness.
“I suppose it depends on you whether I go or stay.”
“On me?” He stared at her across Owen’s scattered papers. “Good God! What can you think of me, to say that?”
The mockery of the question flashed back at him from her wretched face. She stood up, wandered away, and leaned an instant in the darkening window-frame. From there she turned to fling back at him: “Don’t imagine I’m the least bit sorry for anything!”
He steadied his elbows on the table and hid his face in his hands. It was harder, oh, damnably harder, than he had expected! Arguments, expedients, palliations, evasions, all seemed to be slipping away from him: he was left face to face with the mere graceless fact of his inferiority. He lifted his head to ask at random: “You’ve been here, then, ever since?”
“Since June; yes. It turned out that the Farlows were hunting for me—all the while—for this.”