“The Cardinal's snuff-box,” he exclaimed, picking it up.
The Cardinal had dropped his snuff-box. Here was an excuse, and to spare. Peter rang the bell.
XXIV
And, like the lady in the ballad, sure enough, she greeted his arrival with a glance of cold surprise.
At all events, eyebrows raised, face unsmiling, it was a glance that clearly supplemented her spoken “How do you do?” by a tacit (perhaps self-addressed?) “What can bring him here?”
You or I, indeed, or Mrs. O'Donovan Florence, in the fulness of our knowledge, might very likely have interpreted it rather as a glance of nervous apprehension. Anyhow, it was a glance that perfectly checked the impetus of his intent. Something snapped and gave way within him; and he needed no further signal that the occasion for passionate avowals was not the present.
And thereupon befell a scene that was really quite too absurd, that was really childish, a scene over the memory of which, I must believe, they themselves have sometimes laughed together; though, at the moment, its absurdity held, for him at least, elements of the tragic.
He met her in the broad gravelled carriage-sweep, before the great hall-door. She had on her hat and gloves, as if she were just going out. It seemed to him that she was a little pale; her eyes seemed darker than usual, and graver. Certainly—cold surprise, or nervous apprehension, as you will—her attitude was by no means cordial. It was not oncoming. It showed none of her accustomed easy, half-humorous, wholly good-humoured friendliness. It was decidedly the attitude of a person standing off, shut in, withheld.
“I have never seen her in the least like this before,” he thought, as he looked at her pale face, her dark, grave eyes; “I have never seen her more beautiful. And there is not one single atom of hope for me.”