XLVI
THE pictures of far places had stirred him but slightly: but to travel with Annot, to see anything with Annot, would offer continual amusement and surprise; her vigorous candor, her freedom from sham and petty considerations, enveloped the most commonplace perspectives in an atmosphere of high novelty. The trace of the vagabond, the detachment of the born dweller in tents, woven so picturesquely through his being, responded to her careless indifference to the tyranny of an established and timid scheme of existence.
The following day her old, bright hardness had returned: she railed at him in French, in German, in Italian; she called him the solemn shover, Sir Anthony Absolute. And, holding Thomas Huxley's head directed toward him, recommended that resigned quadruped to emulate Anthony's austere and inflexible virtues.
XLVII
BUT there was no trace of gayety in the excited and subdued tones in which, later, she called him into the hothouse. He found her bending tense with emotion over the row of plants upon whose flowering such incalculable things depended. “Look!” she cried, taking his hand and drawing him down over the green shoots, where his cheek brushed her hair, where he felt the warm stir of her breathing. “Look! they are in full bud, to-morrow they will burst open.” She straightened up, his hand still held in hers, and a shadow fell upon her vivid countenance. “If his reasoning is wrong, this experiment... like all the others, it will kill him. They must be white, it would be too cruel, too senseless not. I am afraid,” she said simply; “nature is so terrible, a Juggernaut, crushing everything to dust beneath its wheeling centuries. I am glad that you are here, Anthony.” She drew closer to him; her breast swelled in a sharp, tempestuous breath.
“I have been lonelier than I—I realized. I am dreadfully worried about father. They have lied to me; things are worse, I can see that. You have to dress him like a child; I know how considerate you are; you are bright, new gold with the clearest ring in the world.
“We must get a real chauffeur; you have never been that... in my thoughts. You know,” she laughed happily, “I said in the beginning that you were a miserable affair in details of that kind.”
A feeling of guilt rose swiftly within him, which, unwilling to acknowledge, he strove to beat down from his thoughts. But, above his endeavor, grew the clear conviction that he should immediately tell Annot his purpose in driving Rufus Hardinge's car. He must not victimize her generosity, nor take profit from the friendship she offered him so unreservedly. He was dimly conscious that the revelation of his design would end the pleasant intimacy growing up between them; the mere mention of Eliza must destroy their happy relations; girls, even Annot, were like that.