"Happily she wasn't in the least hurt," he replied. "She must have been in a fit of abstraction."
"I caught sight of her face," said Lady Betty; "and I shall not easily forget it. Such a wild, haggard look I have seldom seen. She must have been labouring under some terrible stress of emotion." She gently withdrew her hand, and appeared lost in thought. "I hope, dear," she exclaimed suddenly, "that there is nothing horrible happening."
"No, indeed! The thing has got a little bit on your nerves."
"You did not see her," she insisted. "She came full into the light of our lamp, though it was barely for an instant. My face was turned that way and yours away from hers."
"Naturally she was startled at the moment!" he ventured. He was certain Lady Betty's nervous imagination had deceived her, and that her alarm was groundless.
"It was not a startled look. It was a set look, something like the desperation of a hunted animal. Some man has treated her badly. Darling, you don't think she was going to throw herself into the river?"
"Seriously—I don't think anything of the kind. If she had wanted to take her life, would she have stepped back so promptly?" he argued.
"I daresay you are right," she conceded, though her tone was not wholly one of conviction.
The hansom pulled up, and he helped her down. They mounted the house-steps in silence, she unusually engrossed in thought, and with an unmistakable air of sadness, as if her mind still lingered on this woman's figure that had flashed on them out of the darkness.
They entered the hall, and after some searching and fumbling he lighted one of the lamps. His companion shook herself out of her abstraction, and surveyed the place with affectionate interest. He was anxious she should take away with her a very definite impression of his future home, and threw open the various rooms, and led the way into them, as he held the lamp aloft. They went, too, below stairs, and here Lady Betty's eyes beheld the many evidences of domestic comfort and foresight that the Robinsons had established in these regions where they had reigned supreme. Her face lighted in comprehension, though her thought remained unexpressed. At last, after they had completely explored the rest of the house, he led the way up to the studio, and soon had it brilliantly illuminated. Lady Betty refused the chair he wheeled forward for her. She preferred to be moving about, to be examining everything at leisure—his bureau, his great oak worm-eaten armoires, his long, low chests on whose panels Gothic Church dignitaries stood solemnly in high relief, his wonderful easels, his model's throne, his draperies and costumes, and, so far as it was possible by this lamp-light, his old canvasses. She did not ask for Miss Robinson's portrait, as she knew it was at the house in Hampstead, and would remain there till its despatch to the Academy. She saw, however, the large picture; and although she did not love it (for she knew at what a cost it had been brought up to its present pitch, and felt, moreover, that it was too sensational a bid for public attention), she yet recognised that there was much excellence in it, and that it would probably bring him the actual success which was of importance even to genius. Her ideal for him, she repeated, would have been the most absolute "no compromise." "But I agree that we must take a strictly practical view of the situation. It is not really compromise," she added, "but only a surer grasping of the ideal in the future. The idealist who does not know when to make his concessions in practice is just the one who loses his ideal altogether, and never comes down from the realm of abstractions."