CHAPTER XXIV AFTERMATH
“I beg your pardon!”
Instinctively Cara apologised, although actually the collision had been no fault of hers. The man with whom she had collided had been striding along with bent head, completely absorbed in his own thoughts, and had awakened too late to the fact that some one was coming towards him along the narrow bridle-path through the woods. He lifted his hat mechanically and murmured some sort of apology, but his eyes remained blank and seemed to look through and beyond the woman into whom he had just cannoned without seeing her—certainly without recognising her.
Cara was startled by their expression of strain. They seemed to glare with a hard, unnatural brilliance, as though the man’s vision were focused upon some terrible inner presentment. She laid a detaining hand on his sleeve, but he appeared quite unconscious of her touch and she gave his arm a little shake.
“Eliot!” she said quickly. “Eliot! Are you trying to cut me?”
As though by an immense effort he seemed to come back to the consciousness of his material environment.
“To cut you?” he repeated dully. He brushed his hand across his forehead. “No, of course I wasn’t trying to cut you.”
He looked shockingly ill. His face was grey and lined, and his shoulders sagged as though he were physically played out. The boots and leggings he wore were caked with mud, and his coat had little torn ends of wool sticking up over it, as if he had been walking blindly ahead, careless of direction, and had forced his way through thickets of bramble rather than turn aside to seek an easier path.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” she asked rather breathlessly. In every nerve of her she felt that something terrible had happened. “You look”—trying to summon up a smile—“as if you’d been having a battle.”
“I’ve been walking.”