“The little thing’s been talking, talking,” she said, “the quaintest little thoughts. I’ve seen it coming for days now. Sometimes I’ve seen her lips moving. She’s the most precise enunciation in the world.”
“I wired Ellida this afternoon,” Robert Grimshaw said.
“Then Ellida will be down here by the last train?” Katya answered, and he commented: “We’ve only got an hour.”
“But little Kitty,” she was beginning.
“No, no,” he interrupted. “Nobody must be talked about but us. Nobody must be talked about but us. I’m as glad as you or Ellida or Paul could possibly be about Kitty, but now that I have got you alone at last you’re bound to face the music.”
“But little Kitty?” Katya said. She said it, however, only for form’s sake, for Robert Grimshaw’s gentle face was set in a soft inflexibility, and his low tones she knew would hold her to the mark. She had to face the music. In the half-darkness his large eyes perused her face, dark, mournful and tender. The low, long farmhouse room with its cheap varnished furniture was softened by the obscure light from the fire over which he had been standing for a very long hour.
“Is it the same terms, then?” he asked slowly, and she answered:
“Exactly the same.”
He looked down at the fire, resting his hand on the chimney-piece. At last she said: “We might modify it a little;” and he moved his face, his eyes searching the obscurity in which she stood, only one of her hands catching the glow from the fire.
“I cannot modify anything,” he said. “There must be a marriage, by what recognized rite you like, but—that.”