"What do you mean?" he said, sitting up, with again the startled, haggard expression on his face. "What should have happened?"
"I don't know," Rachel said, startled too at his look and manner. "You look so tired, so ill."
"Oh, I'm all right," he said, taking up and drinking eagerly the cup of tea that almost mechanically she had poured out and pushed towards him, and as he did so he realised that he had had no food since the morning. He ate and drank and then again lay back in his chair and was silent. As Rachel looked at him the absolute conviction swept over her—she knew not why—that he had been concerned in the terrible catastrophe of which she had heard the broken accounts. It began to dawn upon her that in some inconceivable way the thing had happened to him; that it was of him those women were speaking. She still heard Lady Adela saying: "Did you ever see any one look so awful?" And yet what could it be? What horrible misunderstanding was it? What horrible mistake could have been made?
She sat and waited. Not the least of her charms was that she knew, what many women do not know, how to sit absolutely quiet. She knew when to refrain from questioning, how to sit by her companion in so peaceful, so final a manner, as it were, that he did not feel that she was simply waiting for what he would do next.
The band blared out again with renewed vigour. Rendel leant his elbows on his knees, his face between his hands.
"Oh! that miserable noise!" he said. "Will it never leave off? The hideousness of it all!—those people, that band! Oh! to get away from it all!" he muttered half to himself.
"Frank," said Rachel entreatingly, touching his arm, "if you don't like it why shouldn't we go away from it? I think it is horrible, too. I went out of the garden to-day to where the people were walking."
Rendel looked up quickly.
"Did you? Did you see any one you knew?"
"Yes," said Rachel; "I saw Mr. Pateley."