"We have missed you dreadfully, of course. I need not tell you what a void your absence must necessarily make. We all know you are beyond spoiling."
She looked at him, and something in his face warned her not to pursue this tone. She felt vaguely that the position was unreal, and must be changed. He knew, as she supposed, what she was thinking of; she knew, as he fancied, what he was thinking of; and though, as it happened, each was wrong, it was manifestly absurd to carry on false pretences any longer. Woman-like, she was the first to brave the difficulty of the situation.
"You have come to me," she said steadily, and looking at him with the clear upheld gaze peculiar to her, "because you have heard something which concerns me nearly, and because, man of the world,--of this heartless world around us,--as you are, and accustomed to such things, still you feel for me; because you would have prevented this thing if you could; because you tried to prevent it, and failed; because you knew--yes, Sir Laurence Alsager, because you knew the extent and the power of the danger that menaced me, and my helplessness: say, am I right?--for these reasons you are here to-day."
The composure of her voice was gone, but not its sweetness; her colour had faded to a marble paleness; and her hands were firmly clasped together. Alsager had risen as she spoke, and was standing now, leaning against the low velvet-covered mantelpiece. He answered hurriedly, and with scant composure:
"Yes, Lady Mitford, for these reasons, and for others."
"For what others?"
This almost in a whisper.
"Never mind them now," he said impetuously; and then the superficial restraint which he had imposed upon himself gave way, broke down before that strongest and most terrible of temptations, the sight of the sorrow and the silent confidence of the woman one loves, granted at the moment when a hope, a guilty hope, that that love may not be vain, begins to stir, like life, at one's heart. She shrank a little back in the chair, but she looked at him as earnestly as before.
"It's all true, then," he said,--and there was a tone of deep and bitter hatred in his voice,--"all true. The prophecy I heard among those fellows the first time I ever heard your name--the coarse language, the cynical foresight,--all true. That heartless demon has caught his shallow nature in her shallow lure, and worked the woe of an angel!"
His voice rang with a passionate tremor, his eyes deepened and darkened with the passionate fervour which glowed in them. His impetuous feeling mastered her. She had no power to arrest him by a conventional phrase, though he had overstepped more than conventionality by invading the sacred secrecy of her domestic grief.