"But you don't now?" Arthur asked.
"I've been watching him—and thinking—since you came," she said slowly, hesitating between her phrases. "And it has seemed—as if I had got the key of a puzzle that had been worrying me. It—it worked. It accounted for so much that had been just a little mysterious. I have had, sometimes, a horrid feeling of uneasiness and have been angry with myself for doubting him. But after you came—I suppose it was just an accident that it was connected with you, more particularly; it would have been just the same with any one else, of course—well after that, as I said just now, I saw it all happening."
She paused, but Arthur made no reply. He was leaning on his elbow looking down over the broken sweep of the weald. For him, the "key" of which she had spoken was not yet plain. There were traits in the character of the old man, that Arthur believed were not consistent with Eleanor's judgment of him as "inhuman."
His mind was busy with the search for excuses and extenuations, when Eleanor began in a new voice, "I suppose you think it very rotten of me to have said all that about him, and, in any case, you don't believe me."
"I do; I do," Arthur protested, rousing himself from his abstraction. "I don't think it's rotten of you in the very least. What I'm doubting is whether your deductions are sound."
She appeared now to have given up any hope of persuading him, and looked at him with a frank smile as she said, "Well, I suppose we ought to be setting our faces towards home?"
"Oh, no! not yet," Arthur replied, with such evident distress in his voice that she laughed outright.
"But surely you must be pining to get back to your golf and billiards and croquet?" she suggested. "Or, if we start now, we might get in some tennis after tea."
"I don't believe I have ever heard you laugh before to-day," was Arthur's answer.
"It isn't exactly a gay house, is it?" she replied.