Piers was warned by his tactful conscience that he had held Miss Derwent quite long enough in talk. A movement in their neighbourhood gave miserable opportunity; he resigned his seat to another expectant, and did his best to converse with someone else.
Her voice went with him as he walked homewards across the Park, under a fleecy sky silvered with moonlight; the voice which now and again brought back so vividly their first meeting at Ewell. He lived through it all again, the tremors, the wild hopes, the black despair of eight years ago. How she encountered him on the stairs, talked of his long hours of study, and prophesied—with that indescribable blending of gravity and jest, still her characteristic—that he would come to grief over his examination. Irene! Irene! Did she dream what was in his mind and heart? The long, long love, his very life through all labours and cares and casualties—did she suspect it, imagine it? If she had received his foolish verses (he grew hot to think of them), there must have been at least a moment when she knew that he worshipped her, and does such knowledge ever fade from a woman's memory?
Irene! Irene! Was she brought nearer to him by her own experience of heart-trouble? That she had suffered, he could not doubt; impossible for her to have given her consent to marriage unless she believed herself in love with the man who wooed her. It could have been no trifling episode in her life, whatever the story; Irene was not of the women who yield their hands in jest, in pique, in lighthearted ignorance. The change visible in her was more, he fancied, than could be due to the mere lapse of time; during her silences, she had the look of one familiar with mental conflict, perhaps of one whose pride had suffered an injury. The one or two glances which he ventured whilst she was talking with the man who succeeded to his place beside her, perceived a graver countenance, a reserve such as she had not used with him; and of this insubstantial solace he made a sort of hope which winged the sleepless hours till daybreak.
He had permission to call upon Mrs. Borisoff at times alien to polite routine. Thus, when nearly a week had passed, he sought her company at midday, and found her idling over a book, her seat by a window which viewed the Thames and the broad Embankment with its plane trees, and London beyond the water, picturesque in squalid hugeness through summer haze and the sagging smoke of chimneys numberless. She gave a languid hand, pointed to a chair, gazed at him with embarrassing fixity.
"I don't know about the Castle," were her first words. "Perhaps I shall give it up."
"You are not serious?"
Piers spoke and looked in dismay; and still she kept her heavy eyes on him.
"What does it matter to you?" she asked carelessly.
"I counted on—on showing you the dales——"
Mrs. Borisoff nodded twice or thrice, and laughed, then pointed to the prospect through the window.