Ah Sing tapped and handed in the champagne. She pushed it aside with a gesture of disgust.
“Take it away. Did you do as I told you?”
“Yes, missee, Mr. Clive in dlawing-loom now.”
He went out, and still Helena stared at herself in the mirror with angry terrified eyes. After all, she was but a girl with a woman’s theories. What she was determined upon had seemed very easy and picturesque at long range. She had even rehearsed it mentally during the past two days; but now that she was to enact the rôle it appalled her. She recalled several scenes of the sort as presented by the makers of fiction (the canny and imaginative Frenchmen for the most part), but failed to find spiritual stamina in the retrospect.
“What a fool! What a fool!” she thought. “I, who have prided myself that I have a will of iron. If his first duty is to me he will stay, and two people will be happy instead of miserable. As for Mary Gordon she will marry the curate inside of five years.”
She retreated suddenly to her wardrobe, and wrapped a broad scarf about her shoulders and bust, then brought her foot down and went resolutely out into the corridor.
The fog was banked in the court. The palms looked like the dissolving eidola of themselves. The invisible fountain splashed heavily, as if oppressed.
“I needed the shawl, after all,” she thought grimly. “A sneeze might be fatal.”
She walked rapidly down the corridor to the drawing-room, and without giving herself an instant for vacillation, turned the knob and went in. Then she cowered against the door and would have exchanged every hope she possessed for the privilege of retreat. But Clive had seen her.
He was standing by the mantel. He looked his best, as he always did in evening dress. Even as Helena wondered if the earth were quaking beneath Casa Norte, she was conscious of his remarkable physical beauty. He had his pipe in his hand. It dropped suddenly to the mantel-shelf. But he did not go forward to meet her.