"Clodagh, my dear," he began at last, "if there is anything I can do——"
But Clodagh turned away.
"No," she said almost inaudibly; "no, there is nothing. I'd like to be alone. I want to be alone."
And Milbanke—perplexed, embarrassed, vaguely unhappy—turned slowly, and walked across the terrace after his scientific friend.
Clodagh waited until the last sound of Mr. Tomes's loud, rolling voice had melted into the distance with the departure of his gondola; then with a stiff, tired movement she rose, walked in her own turn across the terrace, and, leaning upon the stone parapet, gazed out into the purple twilight, as she had gazed on the evening of her first arrival.
How long ago—how infinitely far away—that first arrival seemed to her! With the capacity for the assimilation of new emotions that belongs to all her race, she had lived more keenly during the last three days, than during the preceding four years. To one of her temperament, life is not a matter of time, but of experience. At eighteen she had been a child; on her twenty-second birthday she had been a girl; and now, when that birthday was past by but a few months, she was conscious of the stirring of her womanhood—roused into swift activity by the first approach of the world with its men and women, its laxities and prejudices, its infinite potentialities for good or evil.
Some vague foreshadowing of this idea was casting itself across her mind, when the thread of her musings was suddenly broken by a quick step sounding across the deserted terrace, and with a slight, involuntary movement, she straightened herself, and brought her hands together upon the cold surface of the parapet.
Sir Walter Gore had parted with Barnard in the hall of the hotel; and now he crossed the terrace quickly, conscious of the fast falling twilight. He was close to the flight of stone steps that led to the water, before the flutter of Clodagh's light dress caught his preoccupied attention.
Seeing her, he paused and raised his hat.
"You look very mysterious, Mrs. Milbanke," he said. "Has your husband gone indoors?"