Her colour quickened. She looked around and still no one appeared. “It’s so kind of you to come like this,” she said. “You say things—But I have felt that you wanted to be brotherly....”
“Whatever I can be,” assured Mr. Brumley.
“My situation here,” she said, her dark frankness of gaze meeting his troubled eyes. “It’s so strange and difficult. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know—what I want to do....”
“In London,” said Mr. Brumley, “they think—they say—you have been taken off—brought down here—to a sort of captivity.”
“I have,” admitted Lady Harman with a note of recalled astonishment in her voice.
“If I can help you to escape——!”
“But where can I escape?”
And one must admit that it is a little difficult to indicate a correct refuge for a lady who finds her home intolerable. Of course there was Mrs. Sawbridge, but Lady Harman felt that her mother’s disposition to lock herself into her bedroom at the slightest provocation made her a weak support for a defensive fight, and in addition that boarding-house at Bournemouth did not attract her. Yet what other wall in all the world was there for Lady Harman to set her back against? During the last few days Mr. Brumley’s mind had been busy with the details of impassioned elopements conducted in the most exalted spirit, but now in the actual presence of the lady these projects did in the most remarkable manner vanish.
“Couldn’t you,” he said at last, “go somewhere?” And then with an air of being meticulously explicit, “I mean, isn’t there somewhere, where you might safely go?”
(And in his dreams he had been crossing high passes with her; he had halted suddenly and stayed her mule. In his dream because he was a man of letters and a poet it was always a mule, never a train de luxe. “Look,” he had said, “below there,—Italy!—the country you have never seen before.”)