“Did she? The little beast! Well, go and dress.”
CHAPTER XXIV
AS Cecil and Lee were descending the tower stair an hour later he said to her:
“Don’t look for me to-night when you are ready to come home; I am coming straight here after dinner. It’s high time I got to work on my speeches.”
She slipped her hand into his. “Shall I come too and sit with you?”
He returned her pressure and did not answer at once. Then he said: “No; I think I’d rather you didn’t. If I am to lose you for a year I had better get used to it as soon as possible.”
She lifted her head to tell him that she had no intention of leaving him for the present, then felt a perverse desire to torment him a little longer. She intended to be so charming to him later that she felt she owed that much to herself. But she was dressed to-night for his special delectation. If Cecil had a preference in the matter of her attire it was for transparent white, and she wore a gown of white embroidered mousseline de soie flecked here and there with blue.
They were still some distance from the door which led into the first of the corridors, for the stair was winding, worn, and steep, and, in spite of several little lamps, almost dark. Cecil paused suddenly and turned to her, plunging his hands into his pockets. She could hardly see his face, for a slender ray from above lay full across her eyes; but she had thought, as she had joined him in the sitting-room above a few moments since, that he had never looked more handsome. He grew pale in London, but a few days on the moors always gave him back his tan; and it had also occurred to her that the past two weeks had given him an added depth of expression, robbed him of a trifle of that serenity which Circumstance had so persistently fostered.
“There is something I should like to say,” he began, with manifest hesitation. “I shouldn’t like you to go on thinking that I have not appreciated your long and unfailing sacrifice during these three years. I was too happy to analyse, I suppose, and you seemed happy too; but of course I can see now that you were making a deliberate—and noble—attempt—to—to make yourself over, to suppress an individuality of uncommon strength in order to live up to a man’s selfish ideal. Of course when I practically suggested it, I knew what I was talking about, but I was too much of a man to realise what it meant—and I had not lived with you. I can assure you that, great as your success was, I have realised, in this past week, that I had absorbed your real self, that I understood you as no man who had lived with you and loved you as much as I—no man to whom you had been so much, could fail to do. I am expressing myself about as badly as possible, but the idea that you should think me so utterly selfish and unappreciative after all you have given up—have given me—has literally tortured me. I don’t wonder you want a fling. Go and have it, but come back to me as soon as you can.”
She made no reply, for she wanted to say many things at once. But it is possible that he read something of it in her eyes—at least she prayed a few hours later that he had—for he caught her hard against him and kissed her many times. Then he hurried on, as if he feared she would think he had spoken as a suppliant.