Mrs. Compton stared out into the garden.
"You'd better take the letter, hadn't you? It gives Sigrid a chance to decide for herself."
"Oh, very well." She snatched the letter from Barclay's hands and made her exit with what sounded like the challenging snort of an old war-horse. Barclay maintained his position quietly. He made no effort to speak to Mrs. Compton, who continued to ignore him. But, without knowing it, his restraint began to trouble her, and she resorted to the mannerism of stage heroes when confronted by the villain and a painful situation. She opened a silver case on the table beside her, selected a cigarette, and began to smoke with an insulting satisfaction. Had Barclay offered her the lighter which she was certain he possessed, she felt that she would have infallibly struck him; but he stood stroking his moustache, and apparently as unconscious of her as she pretended to be of him. The silence became intolerable. Furiously conscious that he had beaten her on her own ground, she got up and went out on to the balcony, only to realize with increased annoyance that she had been beaten by a second. Mrs. Smithers had returned. She did not look at Barclay, and addressed her message to the opposite wall.
"You can go in," she said.
He bowed, showing no sign of elation or surprise, and the door closed behind him. Mary Compton returned, and the two women busied themselves with the tea-things which had been brought in, paying the function more intent interest than was usual. They were both nervous. For all Mrs. Smithers's excessive clatter, they could hear voices, muffled and continuous, and something in the sound paralysed their initiative. Neither wished to listen, but they found nothing with which to cover their compulsory attention. When Mrs. Smithers spoke at last it was with a breathless tremulousness.
"I don't know what Sigrid did it for," she said. "She didn't want to see any one, and now this creature comes along. Just because he met her once at some reception he'd managed to wriggle himself into—she can be so idiotically good-natured—it was a begging letter, I'm sure: the nasty, cadging blackamoor."
Mrs. Compton did not respond directly. She had what, for all men say, is a quality equally rare in both sexes, a profound reverence for the reticences and secrets of her friends, and she wished to avoid the confidences which might be hovering on Mrs. Smithers's unsteady lips.
"I hate meeting that man," she said, by way of an answer. "He frightens me. I always think of him as an English sin come home to roost—a bird of ill-omen, not necessarily bad, just foredoomed to evil. I wish he hadn't come to Gaya."
"I wish he'd leave Sigrid alone," Mrs. Smithers muttered.
Mary Compton knew now that Barclay had been at the dâk-bungalow before, and wished she did not know. The knowledge troubled her, increasing an inexplicable uneasiness. Something was going on in that next room. Though she could not and would not have heard the words, the voices persisted in attaining her consciousness. Their tone was neither angry nor excited, but intensely earnest. Business? What business could James Barclay have with a woman he scarcely knew? She could not avoid the question. Then came a silence infinitely worse than the voices—it was so sudden and prolonged.