He seemed to have forgotten that the younger man was in the room, for he did not look toward him again or pay him any attention for a long while. He only gazed out of the window into the fresh morning sunlight, and his face worked and quivered and his lean hands chafed restlessly together before him. But at last he seemed to realize where he was, for he turned with a sudden start and stared at Ste. Marie, frowning as if the younger man were some one he had never seen before. He said:
"Ah, yes, yes. You were wanting to go out into the garden. Yes, quite so. I--I was thinking of something else. I seem to be absent-minded of late. Don't let me keep you here."
He seemed a little embarrassed and ill at ease, and Ste. Marie said:
"Oh, thanks. There's no hurry. However, I'll go, I think. It's after eleven. I understand that I'm on my honor not to climb over the wall or burrow under it or batter it down. That's understood. I--"
He felt that he ought to say something in acknowledgment of O'Hara's long speech about his daughter, but he could think of nothing to say, and, besides, the Irishman seemed not to expect any comment upon his strange outburst. So, in the end, Ste. Marie nodded and went out of the room without further ceremony.
He had been astonished almost beyond words at that sudden and unlooked-for breakdown of the other man's impregnable reserve, and dimly he realized that it must have come out of some very extraordinary nervous strain, but he himself had been in no state to give the Irishman's words the attention and thought that he would have given them at another time. His mind, his whole field of mental vision, had been full of one great fact--the girl was to be married to young Arthur Benham. The thing loomed gigantic before him, and in some strange way terrifying. He could neither see nor think beyond it. O'Hara's burst of confidence had reached his ears very faintly, as if from a great distance--poignant but only half-comprehended words to be reflected upon later in their own time.
He stumbled down the ill-lighted stair with fixed, wide, unseeing eyes, and he said one sentence over and over aloud, as the Irishman standing beside the window had said another.
"She is going to be married. She is going to be married."
It would seem that he must have forgotten his previous half-suspicion of the fact. It would seem to have remained, as at the first hearing, a great and appalling shock, thunderous out of a blue sky.
Below, in the open, his feet led him mechanically straight down under the trees, through the tangle of shrubbery beyond, and so to the wall under the cedar. Arrived there, he awoke all at once to his task, and with a sort of frowning anger shook off the dream which enveloped him. His eyes sharpened and grew keen and eager. He said: