She faced him, with the quickness of lightning, and with a veritable shriek,—it was too loud, too affrighted to be called an exclamation—and Roger recoiled before the expression of the face which was turned towards him. He literally fell back a step or two, gazing at her alarmed and speechless, while she put her hands, one to either side of her head, and shrank together, staring at him with a look of terror and amaze.
‘Ada, my love,’ he began at last, alarmed and bewildered by the contradiction between her manner before she had seen him, and that manner now that she beheld him. Then she found her voice, and rose from the music stool.
‘Roger, Roger!’ she gasped. ‘How can you! Stealing up behind one, and startling one in that way! It’s enough to turn the head, if one’s a nervous person.’
‘But, my darling, I saw that you heard me,’ he began; but she burst into hysterical tears, turning away from him, and flinging herself upon a sofa, so that he saw it was useless to attempt to explain or apologise. Once it crossed his mind, ‘She behaves almost as if she had expected some one else.’ Then he put the idea aside, as we do put ideas aside which we know would be absurd in regard to ourselves, often without stopping to make allowances for the differences in others’ minds and our own.
It was a very distressful scene. Nothing that he could do or say restored calmness to her, though the first violence of her agitation presently wore off. In vain he tried to wring from her some explanation of her altered looks, her nervous terrors; asked her what ailed her, and tenderly upbraided her with not having told him she was out of health. Ada would own nothing, say nothing; and when he rather pitifully said he had hoped to give her a pleasant surprise by his unexpected arrival, she replied with irritation that she hated such surprises; he ought to have written or telegraphed. In fact, Roger, with the deepest alarm, presently saw that his presence was doing her no good, but harm; it was perfectly evident that he had better retire, and he decided to do so. But before going, he said—
‘Now, look here, Ada. Grant me a very great favour, and I’ll not tease you about anything else. Let Michael Langstroth, or Dr. Rowntree, see you. Rowntree, perhaps. He’s such a kind, good old fellow. He would give you something to strengthen you.’
‘I am not ill,’ cried Ada; and she stamped her foot on the ground, and clenched her teeth. ‘I will see none of your doctors. I hate them, and I’ll have nothing to do with them. You will make me ill, if you don’t let me alone.’
Every sign warned Roger that this was a subject it would be best not to pursue any farther, and he presently left her. He had no heart to go into the shop again and speak to Mr. Dixon. Slowly and dispiritedly he made his way back to the Red Gables, and found Michael there, astonished to see him back again so soon, and looking the questions he felt he would not ask.
‘I don’t know, Michael,’ said Roger, in answer to this look. ‘There’s something awfully wrong. I must see her father to-morrow. She denies that anything ails her, but at the same time she goes on in such a way as no one would who was all right. It is not the end—I know it is not the end.’
On the following day it seemed as if the end, so far as Roger was concerned, had arrived. In the forenoon Mr. Dixon made his appearance, and asked to see Roger. Then, slowly and with difficulty, he unfolded the fact that Ada had summoned him to her after her lover’s departure, and had told him that she could never be Roger’s wife; that her life was a misery to her, so long as she was engaged to him, and that if her father wished to see her well and happy again, he was to take this opportunity of telling Roger so, and of making him understand that she did not wish to see him again.