“Don’t you see?” Stephen answered smoothly, his eyes very kind, his voice affectionate and solicitous. “Every moment you stay here, Hugh, you run a great risk. You must get away, at once, to some safe place, and then—I’ll make the search for you. Indeed I intended doing so.”
“No—no—that wouldn’t be right,” Hugh said impulsively, not in the least knowing why he said it. “I don’t know why,” he added slowly, “but that wouldn’t be right.” As he spoke he turned his head and looked over his shoulder almost as if listening to some one from whose prompting he spoke. The movement of his head was unusual and somehow suggested apprehension. And he spoke hesitatingly, automatically, as if some one else threw him the word.
“What are you looking at?” Stephen said uneasily.
Hugh turned back with an awkward laugh. “Ah—um—nothing,” he said lamely.
CHAPTER XXXI
Often life seems one long series of interruptions; and, more often than not, interruptions are petty and annoying. That it is our inconsequential acquaintances who interrupt us most frequently is easily enough understood—far more easily understood than accepted. But it is much more difficult to understand how often some crisis is transmuted or decided by some very minor personality, and a personality in no way concerned in the crucial thing it decides or alters.
Stephen was determined that Hugh should go—and go now.
Hugh was determined to stay, at all cost, until he had searched, and exhausted search of, this room to which both he and Helen had been so stupendously impressed.
Helen wished him to stay, but feared his staying. Her will in the matter swung an unhappy pendulum to and fro between the two wills of the brothers.
Hugh, Helen, and Stephen, and of all the world they alone, were vitally interested in the pending decision and in its consequences. How that decision would have gone, left to them, can never be known.