“No, of course not.” Then he turned his body round and looked her in the face. “But you do understand so splendidly. You always have understood. You see, you trust a fellow.” Then he added quickly, “You’re trusting me now, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she answered, looking at him steadily, “perfectly. Only, just these last few days, perhaps I’ve been a little tiny bit worried. You haven’t been looking happy, and then I’m always worried; it’s so seldom that you’re not all right.”
“But you’d rather not know—what’s going on, I mean. It’s all right, perfectly right, and if it wasn’t—if it wasn’t right for you, I mean, as well as for me—I wouldn’t go on with it for a moment. Only it’s dreadfully important.”
“Yes, dear, I know. And if Mr. Maradick knows about it——”
“He’s a brick, isn’t he?” Tony interrupted eagerly. “You know, so few middle-aged men can understand the point of view of a chap who’s only about twenty-five. They are either fatherly and patronising or schoolmasterly and bossing, or kind of wise and beneficent; but Maradick’s most awfully young really, and yet he’s wise too. He’s a ripper.”
He stopped. They neither of them spoke for some minutes. “It will be quite all right, mother,” he said, “very soon. Just now things are a little difficult, but we’ll pull through.”
He got up and stood looking down at her. “You are a brick to trust me and not to ask,” he said. “It would make things so awfully difficult if you asked.” He bent down and kissed her. “It’s a bit of luck having you,” he said.
But as soon as he had left the room his face was serious again. He passed Mrs. Lester on the stairs and smiled and hurried on. It was all very well; she was there, of course, real enough and all that sort of thing, but she simply didn’t count for him at that moment, she didn’t exist, really, any more than the hotel or the garden did. Nothing existed except that house in the town with Janet somewhere in it waiting for him to set her free.
That was the one point on which his eyes were now fixed. In his earlier days it had, perhaps, been one of his failings—that he had run rather too eagerly after too many interests, finding in everything so immediate an excitement that he forgot the purpose of yesterday in the purpose of to-day. It had always been the matter with him that he had too many irons in the fire. Life was so full and such fun!—that had been the excuse. Now it was deadly earnest.
But it was the first time that the world had so resolved into one single point for him. He was already years older; these last days had made him that, the uncertainties, the indecisions, the fluctuating enthusiasms, the passing from wonder to wonder. All these had solidified into one thing, and one thing only—Janet, how to get her out, how to marry her, how to have her for always; the rest of the world was in shadow.