"You wish it?" Adrian exclaimed, swift to detect every shade of meaning in her voice. "Because, if not, there is no reason why you should. If you hadn't said just now you wanted to go——"
She drew one hand away and turned a little aside. "I know," she said, "I did say it. Really and truly I don't want to go; it makes me uncomfortable to think about him, but I want to have been."
"Get it over then. Ask, and come away as quickly as you can."
"To-morrow?" said Barbara. "I thought, perhaps, as aunt was not going with us about those photograph frames, that to-morrow might do. I couldn't go with aunt."
"You have thought of everything. Go on."
"You might put me into a cab after we leave the shop," she continued. "I think that would be best. I would go and just inquire, and then come straight on here. I don't want to explain to anybody, and if you say it is all right——"
"Why, it is all right, of course. That's settled then," said Adrian.
The next day was dreary even for late November. Adrian and Barbara passed through the frame-maker's door into an outer gloom, chilly and acrid with a touch of fog, and variegated with slowly-descending blacks. Everything was dirty and damp. There were gas-lights in the shop windows of a dim tawny yellow.
Scarlett looked right and left at the sodden street and then upward in the direction of the sky. "This isn't very nice," he said; "hadn't we better go straight home?"