"Capital!" he said, "if only you were trying to sit down. But you must n't sit down here. See." He took a tighter hold of her. "... If I help you—so.... Do you think you can manage to the door? It 's only a step."
He urged her into motion with a gentle insistence of arm, and set her the example of a leisurely foot forward. For the first time he felt the exercise of her power in resistance.
"Oh, no, no!" she told him, turning off the two little panting negatives in their sudden hot breath of shame, and stiffening at the suggestion of advance.
"No?" he queried, in audible surprise. "You 're not equal to that? But you must n't stay out here. You need to sit down and have something to pull you up." He brought the other arm about her in a twinkling. "Here, let me lift you," he said. "I 've helped drunken men up three flights of stairs before to-day, fighting every bit of the way. I ought to be able to tackle you as far as the door!"
Before she could absorb the intention through his words he had got her begirt for the raising. The consciousness, coming upon her at such short notice, in company with the action itself, found her without preparation other than a gasp of blank amaze. Then her hand went out to stay him.
"Oh, let me!" she said, with a horrified desire to avert this fresh imposition upon his credulity or good-nature. "I can walk—very well...."
She finished the petition in mid-air, and the sound of his amused, wilful laughter just beneath her ears, as he waded with her through that odious short sea of lamp-light to the black porch.
"There!" he said, to another note of laughter, lowering her carefully till her feet found the square slab of scoured stone, with the scraper set in it, and strove hastily to reassert themselves. "That 's better than bartering in yes's and no's. Thank you for keeping so beautifully still and not kicking me; you could if you 'd tried. So!"
He steered her down the narrow darkness of the porch, with his hands protectively upon her elbows from behind, through a rustle of leaves and the springing of flexible branches. She went before him, without any words. Only when his arm slid past her to throw open wide the door did she seem about to offer any furtherance of demur. But the dreadful publicity of burning wicks lay forward, and the still more dreadful publicity of his face lay behind against retreat, and she went dumbly round the door, and so into the room. He could feel the sudden shrinkage of her being as the full force of the episode surged back upon her in a vivid hot wave out of the lamp-light, and was sorry. She would have dropped down, in the penitential meekness of submission, upon the triangle of chair that showed itself from beneath a litter of the Spawer's music immediately by the door as they entered, but his arm resisted the tell-tale bend of her body.
"No, no," he said, realising her desire for the penance of discomfort rather than the comfort of repose, and jerking the chair out of consideration, "... not there." He thrust the table far out into the room with a quick scream of its castors at being so rudely awakened, and pushed her gently to the sofa.