"It was the mater who insisted on my having a telephone," thought Ronnie. "The mater who furnished this room for me."
He looked round the room--at the Chippendale settee, the bookcases, the eighteenth-century engravings on the beige wall-paper. Looking, his heart misgave him.
The mater! He owed her so much in life. And now--now he was contemplating, more than contemplating, making definite, absolutely definite, a decision of which she could never approve, which might even cost him her love.
The mater! Ever since that moment of crisis in Hyde Park--through luncheon, through the rainy afternoon which followed luncheon, over the dinner she had insisted on his sharing--Ronnie had been watching her face, speculating about her, wondering what she would say if she knew. Now suddenly it seemed to him that she did know.
He tried to put the idea out of mind. But fragments of their conversation--fragments which memory could only imagine to have been hints--kept recurring to him. She had spoken--and this was rare with her--about his father; about a recent matrimonial shipwreck; about her article in the "Contemplatory." And not once, after Wilberforce left them, had she mentioned--Aliette!
The Chippendale clock on the mantelpiece gave a preliminary wheeze, and began chiming ten o'clock. At the sound, misgivings vanished. She--not his mother, but Aliette, Aliette, the very thought of whose name made the pulses hammer in his head--must no longer be kept waiting.
For a moment the shining black of the telephone fascinated Ronnie's eyes; for a moment, as one meditating a great decision, he stood stock-still. Then impulsively he lifted the receiver from its hook.
To his imaginative mind, the telephone became instrument of their fate. Waiting for the call, he saw, as one mesmerized, all their past, all the possibilities of their future; forgetting, in that mesmeric instant, his mother, the law, Brunton, everything in the world except the vivid of Aliette's hair, her deep brown eyes, the poised exquisite slenderness of her.
And an instant later he heard her voice. It came to him, very clear, very deliberate, across the wires:
"Is that you?"