"I should have pulled up," he said, with an uneasy laugh. "I forgot I wasn't on a lone road."
There was still no sign from the woman, shrunk far into her chair, but the doctor rose at his speech with a half-muttered, "We're obliged to you." Ewing rose at the same time, with an impulse to break some strain that he felt himself sharing. The doctor reached out in the dusk and turned on an electric light that hung above the table, looking quickly at Mrs. Lowndes as he did so, for there had come from her a murmur of protest at the light. Ewing also looked at her from where he stood on the hearth rug. The lighting of the room had intensified some electrical current that pulsed from each to each. The woman returned Ewing's gaze with the absorption of one moved beyond all arts of convention. Her eyes glistened, ominous of tears, and her small, lean chin trembled as her lips parted. Ewing turned from her distress, appealing by look to the big man, who watched them both, but his gaze was at once drawn back to the woman. She rose from her chair with weak effort and faced him with something like wild impulse rather than intention, a look, a waiting poise, that shook him with fear of the unknown.
Slowly she brought her hands to a wringing clasp at her breast. Her eyes were frankly wet now as she leaned and peered at him, holding him immovable. Twice her lips parted with dry little gasps, her hands working as if to ring the words from her choked throat.
"My boy!" It was so low that without the look of her lips as they shaped the words he could not have been sure.
"My boy—oh, my boy!" This time they were sharper though no louder, and Ewing's nerves tingled an alarm that ran to the roots of his hair. She came a half step toward him, and he felt that he was drawing her, divined that in another moment she would be throwing herself upon him in surrender to some emotional torrent that raged within her. He was powerless under this sudden, strange assault. Dumbly he watched her, closer now by another step, the clasped hands, fighting blindly toward him, with little retreats to her breast, her dry lips again shaping the words, "My boy—my boy!"
And then, even as his own arms were half extended with an instinctive saving movement—for the woman seemed about to totter—the stillness was broken by quick steps along the hall, the rattle of curtain rings along a rod, and the voice of the maid:
"Mr. Teevan, ma'am!"
There had been an instinctive wrenching asunder of the three at the first sound of steps. Yet traces of the stress under which they had labored were still evident to Randall Teevan as he entered. Mrs. Lowndes had turned to search among the magazines on the table—not before the little man had swept her with a comprehending eye flash.
Ewing, pleasantly delivered from a situation that had grown irksome, a situation rising from what he considered the too-ready sympathy of an emotional old woman, allowed his relief full play in the heartiness of his response to Teevan's greeting. The doctor had squared his shoulders to another pacing of the room.
Teevan, missing no item of the drama he had interrupted, chose for himself the rôle of blind unconsciousness. So well did he enact this that Mrs. Lowndes was convinced, and the belief aided her to recover a proper equanimity. The doctor surveyed the new actor with a skeptic keenness not so readily to be overcome.