"You have been good enough to make that inquiry two or three times a year, for the last five years. I know you think it flatters my vanity."
"And I shall go on asking the same question. When? When? When?" handing him a cup and saucer, which he carried, with the cream-jug, to Lady Perivale, without relaxing the stiffness that had come over his manner when she entered the room.
But the moment had come when he must speak to her, or seem absolutely uncivil.
"Don't you think there are novelists enough between Central Europe and London without my pushing into the field, Lady Perivale?" he asked.
"Oh, but you have been in the field, and have won your battle. I think everybody would like another story from the author of 'Mary Deane.'"
"You do not consider how easily people forget," he said.
"Oh yes, I do," she answered, moved by that faint tremor in his voice which a less interested hearer might not have observed. "You yourself are an instance. It is just a year since you called upon me one afternoon—when Colonel Rannock and I were playing a duet. I suppose our music frightened you, for you stayed hardly five minutes, and you have been unconscious of my existence ever since."
She was determined to speak of Rannock, to let him see that the name was not difficult of utterance; but she could not help the sudden flame-spot that flew into her cheeks as she spoke it.
"Perhaps I had an idea that you did not want me," he said; and then his heart sickened at the thought that this woman, whom he had honoured and admired, whose face had haunted his solitary hours, whose beauty still attracted him with a disquieting charm, was possibly a woman of lost character, whom no self-respecting man could ever dream of as a wife.
He took two or three sips out of the Swansea tea-cup which Susan handed him, put it down hurriedly, snatched his hat, shook hands with his hostess, bowed to Lady Perivale, and had left the house before even the most alert of parlour-maids could fly to her post in the hall.