“Not that more than another, but it did not change my impression.”
“I suspect that to change would always cost you something,” said Anne, smiling.
He was on the watch against a personal note, and held himself woodenly irresponsive. But the fretting consciousness of being tongue-tied whenever he was with her, of being forced into the condition of a surface against which a match was struck in vain, worried his nerves into irritation. More than once he thought that Anne glanced at him with surprise at his dullness, or might it be his coldness. This seemed hardly possible to him, conscious as he was of a fire within which had to be kept down by liberal sluicing with cold water. It was delight to be near her, yet torture, and he told himself that he had been a fool to come. Yet when the men were left in the room after dinner it had become a desert.
The evening might have been blissful.
Opportunity was there, could he have grasped her. Once or twice, it is true, Lord Milborough succeeded in monopolising Anne; but there was scarcely a minute when Wareham was not aware that the privilege might have been his, had he sought it.
Anne’s extreme beauty, the brilliant beauty which belongs to night, the attraction she undoubtedly was bent on exercising, made his brain dizzy. As they parted in the hall, she said reproachfully—
“So you desert us for the whole of to-morrow!”
“Thank goodness!” said a voice behind.
“Discontented men hanging about the whole of the day would be unendurable.”
It was Mrs Martyn. Anne laughed good-humouredly.