“No, no,” he said. “It was merely mentioned, like the state of the weather.”
She detected his confusion.
“You saw him last,” she said. “Did anything unusual occur?” She was regarding him keenly.
“I thought he looked ill, or about to be,” John said, “And I asked the servants to call the doctor. Apparently it was nothing. Anyhow ... I’ve had word that he’s all right.”
She did not pursue the subject, but became suddenly silent, and thereafter avoided John’s eyes, for in the midst of his explanation his expression had changed. He had looked at her in a most extraordinary way and she suffered a deep psychic disturbance. It was as if he had blunderingly discovered a nameless secret. And that was precisely what had happened. As he was talking to her,—positively as he would swear with no wanton curiosity in his mind,—as he looked at her and as her eyes met his in open frankness there came an instant in which he saw how matters stood.
How can one tell? One cannot tell. It tells itself in the way the eyes look back, in what is missing from them, in something there that was not there before, in a certain hardness of the chin.
In no such way had Agnes changed.
That was what John saw. The discovery shook him. All his senses leaped exultingly. She was not Thane’s,—not yet. Wild thoughts got loose. The dining room began to sway. Then he looked at Thane and enormously repented. His feeling for Thane was one of intense affection. He could no more help it than he could help his feeling for Agnes. They were separate chemistries, antagonistic. So he was torn between them, and when he could bear it no longer he began clumsily to excuse himself.
“We are delayed by legal formalities,” he said to Thane. “May be three or four days yet. Take it easy. The company can stand it.”
So he left them abruptly.