He had reached his cottage by now. He went in and shut the door.
He sat down on the oak settle, staring at the little casement window opposite to him, without seeing it. It appeared to him that there were voices talking within his brain or soul,—he didn’t know which,—while he himself was answering one of them—the loudest.
The loudest voice spoke quite cheerfully, and was full of common sense. It urged him to abandon the consideration of the whole matter for the present; it told him that the probability of his meeting the Duchessa was so extraordinarily remote, that it was not worth while torturing his mind with considerations of what line of action he would take should the emergency arise. Should it do so, he could act then as his conscience prompted.
He found himself replying to this voice, speaking almost stubbornly. He had got to fight the matter out now, he declared. He had got to decide absolutely definitely what course of action he intended to pursue, should the emergency he feared arise. He was not going to leave matters to chance and be surprised into saying or doing something he might either way afterwards regret. He knew the danger of not making up his mind beforehand. To which the loud voice responded with something like a sneer, telling him to have it his own way. And then it remained mockingly silent, while another and more insidious voice began to speak.
The insidious voice told him quite gently that this emergency might indeed arise; it pointed out to him the quite conceivable events that might occur from it; it assured him that it had no possible desire that he should break his promise in any way. He was not to dream of giving any explanation to the Duchessa, but that he would owe it to himself, and to her, to give her the faintest hint that at a future date he could give her an explanation. That was all. There would be no breaking of his promise. She could not possibly even guess at what that explanation might be. She would merely realize that something underlay the present appearances.
The proposition sounded perfectly reasonable, perfectly just. His own common sense told him that there could be no harm in it. It was the rightful solution of the difficulty, arrived at by silencing that first loud voice,—the voice which had clearly wished him to abandon all consideration of the matter, that he might be surprised into giving a full explanation of the situation.
Antony drew a long breath of relief.
After all, he had been torturing himself needlessly. She herself had spoken of trust. Should that trust totter for an instant, would not the faintest possible hint be sufficient to re-establish it on a firm basis?
With the thought, the little square of casement window came back once more to his vision. He saw through it an old-fashioned rose bush of crimson roses in the garden; he heard a bird twitter, and call to its mate. The abnormal had vanished, reduced itself once more to plain wholesome common sense. And then suddenly, and without warning, a sentence flashed through his brain.