"Don't take it from me!" His voice was an agonised cry. "It's all I have. It's true. It's true. It must be true!"
They were suddenly in contact ... she felt a warm sense of protection and pity, a longing to comfort and help so strong that she instinctively put her hand to her heart as though she would restrain it.
"Oh, I didn't mean," she cried, "that I'd take anything away from you. No, no—never that. If you thought that I meant that, you're wrong. Keep anything you've got. Perhaps I'm mistaken. The mediums I've known have been charlatans. That's prejudiced me. Then I don't think I want my friends to come back to me in quite that way.... If it's true, it seems to be forcing them, against their will, as it were. Oh! I know a great many people now are finding it all true and good. I don't know anything about it. I shouldn't have said what I did. And then you see I've never lost anyone whom I loved very much."
"Never?" Mr. Lapsley asked, staring at her with wide-open eyes.
"No, never, I think."
He got up and came across to her, standing near to her, looking down upon her. She saw that she had aroused his interest, that she had suddenly switched his attention upon herself.
She had aroused him in the only way that he could be aroused, by stirring his pity for her. She knew exactly how suddenly he saw her—as a lonely, unhappy, deserted old maid. She did not mind; that the attention of any one single human being should be centred upon her for herself was a very wonderful, touching thing.
Silence fell between them; the pretty room, grey and silver in the half-light, gathered intimately around them. When at last he went away it seemed that the last ten minutes had added years to their knowledge of one another.
A strange time for Lizzie followed. Edmund Lapsley had rushed into her life with a precipitate urgency that showed how empty before it had been. But there was more than their mere contact in the affair. She was fighting a battle; all her energies were in it; she was ruthless, savage, tooth-and-nail; he should be snatched from this spiritualism.
It was a silent battle. He never spoke to her again of it. He did not say whether he went or not, and she did not ask him. But soon they were meeting almost every day, and she felt with a strange, almost savage pleasure that her influence over him grew with every meeting. She discovered many things about his character. He was weak, undecided, almost subservient, a man whom she would have despised perhaps had it not been for the real sweetness that lay at the roots of him. She very quickly understood how this girl, Margaret, although so young and so ignorant of the world, must have dominated him. "Any woman could!" she thought almost angrily to herself, and yet there was a kind of pride behind her anger.