Sara smiled a little as she looked upon him from her deep eyes, and Falkenberg answered the smile with a thrill of exquisite pleasure. It was sweet indeed to know this. ‘Two can be steadfast,’ as he had more than once said to himself. These words of hers simply confirmed his love, strengthened his purpose. He would still wait. If he waited long enough, the day might come on which he might be able to serve her.
‘Why, you give me a quid pro quo,’ he said. ‘I did not know you could make jokes.’
‘Do you call that a joke? Perhaps I am not so “simple” as you think me. Perhaps Luise Wilhelmi and I are in one another’s confidence.’
‘Upon what?’ asked Falkenberg. He was leaning forward, his face resting upon his hand; his beautiful, steadfast brown eyes looking directly into hers. He paused in this attitude, waiting for her answer, and, during the pause, the door was opened, and Ellen said:
‘A gentleman, ma’am, to see you.’
She put a card into Sara’s hand, upon which card its owner instantly followed. So quickly, that, when she had perused the words:
‘The Rev. Pablo Somerville, S.J.,
Brentwood College,
Lancashire,’
and raised her eyes, he stood before her, bowing, and regarding her piercingly, but not in the least obtrusively, from his deep-set, inscrutable eyes.
Sara rose instantly, a deep flush mantling her face, which flush Somerville did not fail to note; while Falkenberg, whose composure when he felt himself bien, well-off, at his ease, it was almost impossible to disturb, merely raised his head, and transferred the gaze of his calm brown eyes from Sara’s face to that of Somerville.
Sara was deeply disturbed and surprised. The visit was totally unexpected, on that day at least. Like a flood there rushed over her mind the miserable conviction that Jerome had behaved at any rate with unpardonable carelessness, if not with deliberate intention of wrong-doing. She knew nothing of how far this man was in her lover’s confidence (and Somerville had no intention of furnishing her with any information on that point). She had not had time to consider and decide whether she should receive him cordially or otherwise. All this gave embarrassment and uncertainty to her manner, and made it quite unlike her usual one; while Somerville, as will readily be supposed, was as perfectly, as entirely self-possessed and at his ease here as in the Lecture Theatre at Brentwood, or pacing about the garden at Monk’s Gate with Jerome Wellfield, and recommending him to marry Anita Bolton.