“Go ye in and see,” said she with a stupendous nod. “And if ye get the chuck aht, blame it on to me!”
Bram took the hint, and went in. Joan followed, and pointed to a chair by the table, where Claire sat bending over some work by the light of a candle. The evening was a gray one, and the light was already dim in the big farm kitchen.
“Here’s a friend coom to see ye who doan’t coom so often as he might,” cried Joan, following close on the visitor’s heels. Claire was looking up with eyes in which Bram, with a pang, noted a new look of fear and dismay. For the first time within his recent memory she did not seem glad to see him. He stopped.
“I’ve only come, Miss Claire,” said he in a very modest voice, “to tell you I’m going to London to-morrow on business for the firm. I shall be away ten days or a fortnight; and I came to know whether there was anything I could do for you, either before I go or while I’m there. But if there’s nothing, or if I’m in the way——”
“You’re never in anybody’s way, Mr. Elshaw,” said she quite cordially, but without the hearty ring there used to be in her welcome. “Please, sit down.”
She offered him a chair, and he took it, while Joan, round about whose wide mouth a malicious smile was playing, disappeared into her own precincts of scullery and back-kitchen.
For some minutes there was dead silence, not the happy silence of two friends so secure in their friendship that they need not talk—the old-time silence which they had both loved, but a constrained, uncomfortable taciturnity, a leaden, speechless pause, during which Bram watched with feverish eyes the little face as it bent over her work, and noted that the outline of her cheek had grown sharper.
He tried to speak, to break the horrid silence which weighed upon them both. But he could not. It seemed to him that there was something different about this meeting from any they had ever had, that the air was heavy with impending disaster.
He spoke suddenly at last in a husky voice.