Soon he heard her breathing, soft with a little catch in it like a strangled sob. He sat on then, hearing nothing but that little catch. He did not think at all. He could see nothing. He was sightless in a blind world, coil after coil of grey vapour moving about him, enclosing him, releasing him, enclosing him again—"Poor little thing!" "Poor little thing!" "Poor little thing!"
He did not move as the evening passed into night.
[CHAPTER VII]
DUNCOMBE SAYS GOOD-BYE
At the moment when Clare Westcott was climbing the stairs to her husband's rooms Henry Trenchard was walking up the drive through the Duncombe park. The evening air was dark and misty with a thin purple thread of colour that filtered through the bare trees and shone in patches of lighted shadow against tall outlines of the road. Everything was very still: even his steps were muffled by the matted carpet of dead leaves that had not been swept from the drive. He had told them the time of his arrival but there had been nothing at the station to meet him. That did not surprise him. It had happened before; you could always find a fly at the little inn. But this evening he had wanted to walk the few miles. Something made him wish to postpone the arrival if he could.
The day after to-morrow Duncombe was to go up to London for his operation. Henry hated scenes and emotional atmospheres and he knew that Duncombe also hated them. Everything of course would be very quiet during those two days—beautifully restrained in the best English fashion, but the emotion would be there. No one would be frank; every one would pretend to be gay with that horrible pretence that Englishmen succeed in so poorly. No one would be worse at it than Henry himself.
As he turned the corner of the drive that gave the first view of the house a thin white light, a last pale flicker before dusk, enveloped the world, spread across the lawn and shone upon the square, thick-set building as though a sheet of very thin glass had suddenly been lowered from the sky. The trees were black as ink, the grass grey, but the house was illumined with a ghastly radiancy under the bare branches and the pale evening sky. The light passed and the house was in dusk.