But that did not mean that he did not contemplate Philip’s amazing life. He contemplated it more intensely every day. The woman had all the mystery of invisibility, and yet Henry thought that he would know her if he saw her. He coloured her according to his fancy, a laughing, tender figure who would recognize him, did she meet him, as the one man in the world for whom she had been searching.
He imagined to himself ridiculous conversations that he should have with her. He would propose to marry her, would declare, with a splendid nobility, that he knew of her earlier life, but that “that meant nothing to him.” He would even give up his country for her, would live in Russia, would ... Then he caught Philip’s eye, blushed, bent to pull up his sock, said, in a husky, unconcerned voice:
“Do play something, Millie. Something of Mendelssohn.”
Philip also was thinking of Anna. Through the pages of his stupid novel, as though they had been of glass, he saw her as she had last appeared to him on the platform of the Moscow station. She had been wearing a little round black fur hat and a long black fur coat, her cheeks were pale, her eyes mocking, but somewhere, as though in spite of herself, there had been tenderness. She had laughed at him, but she had, for only a moment perhaps, wished that he were not going. It was that tenderness that held him now. The evening, through which he was now passing, had been terrible—one of the worst that he had ever spent—and he had wondered whether he really would be able to discipline himself to that course on which he had determined, to marry Katherine under the Trenchard shadow, to deliver himself to Mrs. Trenchard, even as the lobster is delivered to the cook. And so, with this desperation, had come, with increasing force, that memory of Anna’s tenderness.
He did not want to live with her again, to renew that old life—his love for Katherine had, most truly, blotted out all the fire and colour of that earlier passion, but he wanted—yes, he wanted most passionately, to save his own soul.
Might it not, after all, be true, as that ghostly figure had urged to him, that it would be better for him to escape and so carry Katherine after him—but what if she did not come?
He heard Mrs. Trenchard’s voice as she spoke to Millie, and, at that sound, he resigned himself ... but the figure still smiled at him behind that glassy barrier.
Katherine also thought of Anna. She was sitting just behind Aunt Betty watching, over the old lady’s shoulder, the ‘Patience’.
“There,” said Aunt Betty, “there’s the ten, the nine, the eight. Oh! if I only had the seven!”
“You can get it,” said Katherine, “if you move that six and five.”