It was strange to herself how all her dreads—physical shrinking and mental anguish—focused in the fear of reading Ethan's consciousness in his face. If blindness could only come upon her, if only she could escape seeing the knowledge in the face she loved, she would, she knew, escape the sharpest pang of all.
What was he thinking now of her long immobility? Why didn't he speak or move? What need? Why should they look each other in the face? She felt his eyes on her back, and a shiver ran between her shoulder-blades. Those eyes of his, how she dreaded them! They pierced through to the brain. They looked into her heart and watched it as it shrank, showing her the while that, whatever she endured, his agony was more.
She bowed her head down over her knees. He gathered her up as if she had been a little child, and rocked her dumbly in his arms. They sat so for a moment, each hiding the face from the other. A loud resounding blow upon the knocker made them start apart.
"The summons!" he thought.
And that morning in the attic came back to him when, as a child, he glowed with excitement and pride to find the old brass knocker bearing his own name.
Val had kept her back turned when she started up, and was standing now before the window looking into the street. The horses were at the door. Ethan went out. She heard him speaking with Scherer, and Scherer's voice saying:
"Julia will be round in five minutes."
Val fled up-stairs and locked the door. She heard her husband coming up, and listened breathless—Scherer, too! A light knock on her door as they passed, and Ethan's voice:
"Don't be long getting ready, dear."
He never said "dear" to her before people.