“I assure you—” Seymour began.
Then Mark forgot himself, his surroundings, his audience.
“Oh—go to Blazes!” he cried. “What do you know about it? You say yourself you’ve never been there. I’ve lived in Moscow for years!”
There was then a tremendous silence, Mrs. Trenchard, Aunt Aggie, Henry, all looked at Seymour as though they said, “Please, please, don’t mind. It shall never happen again.”
Katherine looked at Mark. During that moment’s silence the winter afternoon with its frost and clear skies, its fresh colour and happy intimacies, seemed to beat about the house. In Mark, the irritation that he had felt ever since Seymour’s sentence, seemed now to explode within him, like the bursting of some thunder cloud. He was for a moment deluged, almost drowned by his impotent desire to make some scene, in short, to fight, anything that would break the hot stuffy closeness of the air and let in the sharp crispness of the outer world.
But the episode was at an end. Katherine closed it with:
“Tell Mr. Seymour some of those things that you were telling us last night—about Moscow and Russian life.”
Mrs. Trenchard’s eyes, having concluded their work of consoling Seymour, fastened themselves upon Mark,—watching like eyes behind closed windows; strangely in addition to their conviction that some outrage had been committed there was also a suspicion of fear—but they were the mild, glazed eyes of a stupid although kindly woman....
Mark that evening, going up to dress for dinner, thought to himself, “I really can’t stay here any longer. It isn’t decent, besides, they don’t like me.” He found, half in the dusk, half in the moonlight of the landing-window Katherine, looking for an instant before she went to her room, at the dark Abbey-towers, the sky with the stars frosted over, it seemed, by the coldness of the night, at the moon, faintly orange and crisp against the night blue.