“I laugh?” she queried, with an upward glance of demurely simulated amazement. “Impossible! I assure you I've forgotten how.”
“Ah, now we get to it!” he broke out, with energy. “You're really feeling about it just as I am. You're not satisfied with what we're doing—with the life we're leading—any more than I am. I see that, plain enough, now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I got the idea that you were enjoying it immensely—the greenhouses and gardens and all that sort of thing. And do you know who it was that put me right—that told me you hated it?”
“Oh, don't let us talk of him!” Edith exclaimed, swiftly.
Thorpe laughed. “You're wrong. It wasn't your father. I didn't see him. No—it was my sister. She's never seen you, but all the same she knew enough to give me points. She told me I was a fool to suppose you were happy here.”
“How clever of her!” A certain bantering smile accompanied the words, but on the instant it faded away. She went on with a musing gravity. “I'm sorry I don't get to know your sister. She seems an extremely real sort of person. I can understand that she might be difficult to live with—I daresay all genuine characters are—but she's very real. Although, apparently, conversation isn't her strong point, still I enjoy talking with her.”
“How do you mean?” Thorpe asked, knitting his brows in puzzlement.
“Oh, I often go to her shop—or did when I was in town. I went almost immediately after our—our return to England. I was half afraid she would recognize me—the portraits in the papers, you know—but apparently she didn't. And it's splendid—the way she says absolutely nothing more than it's necessary to say. And her candour! If she thinks books are bad she says so. Fancy that!”
He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. “You never mentioned to me that you had gone there,” he told her, as if in reproach.
“Ah, it was complicated,” Edith explained. “She objects to knowing me—I think secretly I respect her a great deal for that—and therefore there is something clandestine about my getting to know her—and I could not be sure how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest not to mention it.”
“It isn't that alone,” he declared, grave-faced still, but with a softer voice. “Do you remember what I said the other day? It would make all the difference in the world to me, if—if you were really—actually my other half!”