"I don't know," she replied, releasing her hands, and rising. He allowed her to pass him, and to walk to the fireplace. She stood there, her radiant figure glittering in the lustre of the fire and the wax-lights. She stood there, her head bent, her hands before her, the fingers interlaced. After a minute, Routh followed her, and stood before her.
"Then you will not answer me--you will not tell me what your meaning was in sending for me to-night?"
There was tenderness in his tone now, and the slight inflection of a sense of injury which rarely fails with a woman.
"Yes," she said, looking up full at him, "I will tell you. I wanted to let you know that I think of going away."
"Going away!" cried Routh, in unbounded amazement--"Going away! What do you mean?"
"Just what I say," she replied, recovering herself, and resuming her usual tone and manner as soon as he released her from the spell of his earnestness and passion--"I am going away. I don't treat you quite so badly as you try to make out, you see, or I should not tell you about it, or consult you, or anything, but just go--go right away, you know, and make an end of it."
Routh's stern face flushed, and then darkened with a look which Harriet had learned to know, but which Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge had never seen. She did not see it now, and continued:
"I sent for you to tell you this. I don't like the place; I'm tired of it. It's too small, and yet every one comes here, and I'm talked of. Ah, you sneer! Well, I know. I remember all I have said about that, but it is one thing to be talked of in London or Paris, and quite another to be the object of the daily curiosity and the malice--"
"You mean the envy, don't you?"
"No, I don't, I mean the malice; well the envy, or the malice, or only the observation, if you like, of always the same people, whom I meet in always the same places. This is a part of my reason, but only a part. I don't like Mr. Felton, I don't like Mr. Dallas; less than any people in the world I choose to have them to spy and overlook me; and--and--I don't want to be here when that man comes."