... But Ann remained joyfully oblivious of anything amiss.
“Walk straight in,” she called through the window. “I’m coming down.” And with a gay wave of her hand she withdrew into the room. Followed a light sound of footsteps on the stairs, and a minute later the door of the living-room flew open to admit her.
Eliot, who had been standing with his back to the room, staring out of the window, wheeled round as she came towards him with hurrying feet and thrust her eager hands into his.
“You’ve come at last! I thought you’d be here the minute after breakfast,” she began, her face breaking into smiles. “If you were a story-book hero you would have been!... Oh, I know you’ll say it was business that kept you. But that’s only an old married man’s excuse”—mirthfully. “I shan’t allow you to offer it to me until we’ve been married for years and years!”
Thus far she had run on gaily with her tender nonsense, but now she checked herself suddenly as she read no answering smile on his face and felt her hands lie flaccidly ungripped in his.
“Eliot”—she drew back a little—“why don’t you speak? What is it?” Her hands clutched his spasmodically, and a sudden frightened look blurred the radiance in her eyes. “Oh, my dear! What is it? Have you had bad news?”
Very slowly, but with a strange, deliberate significance, he freed his hands from her clasp and put her away from him.
“Yes,” he said quietly, “I’ve had—news.” At the frozen calmness of his tones she shrank back as one shrinks from the numbing cold of the still air that hangs above black ice.
“What is it?” she breathed. “Not bad news—for us?”
Her eyes were fastened on his face, searching it wildly. A quick and terrible fear clamoured at her heart. Was there something in the past, something of which she had no knowledge, that could arise—now—to separate them from each other? That long-ago episode which had wrecked his youth—had the woman who had figured in it some material hold upon him? Could she—was it possible she could still come between them in some way? Ann had heard of such things. It seemed to her as though, betwixt herself and Eliot, there hovered a dim, formless shadow, vague and nebulous—a shadow which had crept silently out from some memory-haunted corner of the past.