She continued to pour oil on his troubled soul, but she withdrew her hands, and not again did she allow herself to come so close to him. He felt vaguely disappointed, even in the midst of her praise.
"I am so humiliated for what I said to you last week," she cried.
"It was what made—this," he said simply.
Suddenly her gaze went beyond him, and he followed it to the doorway. His face clouded. A gust of annoyance swept him for Judith, for this trick she had played him. It was unfair of her thus to force him to meet a man she knew he detested. But his irritation changed to surprise, when Good, with his long awkward stride, hurried toward him, and seized his hand.
"Mr. Imrie," he said genuinely, "I was in your church this morning. I want to tell you that that was one of the biggest things I ever saw. My congratulations probably don't mean much to you, but they're yours without a shadow of a reservation. That was the noblest sermon I ever heard."
The man's enthusiasm was so deep and so obviously sincere that Imrie's instinctive antipathy was banished. After all, he told himself on reflection, his dislike for Good was based on his antagonism for the smug hypocrisy, the senseless irreligion that he had himself attacked only that morning. In a way they were brothers in a common cause. It was with a very different feeling than he had expected that he accepted the tall man's congratulations and with the utmost sincerity that he thanked him.
Supper proved a gay function. Judith was at her happiest, and Good's anecdotes followed one another in merry succession. Imrie found himself insensibly warming to the man he had disliked so intensely, and rather grateful than otherwise to Judith for having arranged so pleasant a meeting.
But when the meal was finished and they were in the library with their coffee, mirth seemed to leave the gathering, and a certain constraint fell upon them all. Each of the men wanted to talk to Judith of matters which were too intimate to share with the other. Their remarks diminished rapidly in frequency and extent, and presently there was complete silence. It was necessary for Judith to break it. She thought it best to get to the heart of things immediately. She addressed herself first to Good.
"Shall I tell him what we have done?" she asked, as if not quite sure of herself. The tall man nodded, not very enthusiastically, it seemed to Imrie.
"Well...." Again she hesitated. "I suppose it's best to break the news without any preliminaries?" Good nodded his assent.