But neither Mrs. Bellingham's neatly worded note, nor her husband's hospitable entreaties, moved Laurence Rivers. He had quite other fish to fry. All he asked for was solitude and sunset; and his courtesy was slightly perfunctory and formal in consequence—so much so, indeed, that on his return Jack Bellingham remarked to his wife:—
"Rivers always was such a good-hearted, sensible sort of fellow, that it's hardly likely coming into this property would turn his head. He's above any vulgarity of that kind. All the same, he really was curiously stand-offish to everybody to-day. The Archdeacon meant to make an afternoon of it, and was a little bit huffed, I think. Rivers was perfectly civil, only he gave us pretty clearly to understand there was no call for any of us to dawdle. I don't know, but somehow I tell you, Louise, I don't quite like his look. We shall see. It would be an awful pity if he followed in the footsteps of the late lamented and turned out a crank."
"I know it," Mrs. Bellingham replied calmly. "But you omit Virginia. I have never seen a woman less likely to tolerate a crank as her husband than Virginia."
And so at length the accustomed quiet settled down on Stoke Rivers. Dinner was over, and the unwelcome daylight fairly flown. Abstinence had gone to sharpen the edge of hunger, and Laurence made his way down the corridor, pulled the curtain towards him, and entered the room of mysterious meetings in a humour to venture much. At the escritoire stood his fairy-lady, and at the sound of the closing door she turned and extended her arms, a world of delicate welcome in her gesture and her face. Then, as he came towards her, she drew back a little, as though penitent of the fervour of her greeting. Her lips moved, but no sound issued from them; and a quick fear went through the young man that, through the action of some malign influence, she had declined upon her former condition and once again become dumb. This raised the spirit of battle in him, and reinforced his resolution to effect her emancipation from the control of whatever opposing power—physical or spiritual—might hold her in its grasp. The more so that, for all her gladness, there was a hint of trouble, a little cloud of distress upon her face, which provoked him to indignation. He hated that—be it what it might—which held her sweet being in thrall.
"Agnes, why is this? Why don't you speak to me?" he demanded.
Whereat she smiled, as one who loves yet deprecates another's unreasoning heat.
"How can I speak," she asked, "until you have first spoken to me?"
"But why not? I don't understand," he said.
"Nor I," she answered; "only I know that so it is. I cannot explain the why and wherefore of this, or of much besides, to myself. I am to myself at once real and unreal—as an echo, a shadow, the reflection in a mirror, is at once real and unreal."
She looked at him seriously, wonderingly, as though trying to take counsel with him against herself.