He shifted his position in the big chair with a weary effort, and let his head fall back. "It's different," he said. "Everything is different. I was alive then—five-and-twenty—and I was afraid you might get yourself into some trouble on my account—you had told me how the Mitchelhurst people gossipped. I understood, but they wouldn't have. Did the old man hear of it?"
"No," said Barbara; "he was ill so soon."
Harding made a slight sign of comprehension. "Well, it wouldn't be my business to say anything now," he went on in his hoarse low voice. "Besides, there is nothing to say. If the Devil had a daughter, she couldn't make any scandal out of an afternoon call in my mother's house. She couldn't suspect you of a flirtation with a death's head. Visiting the sick—it is the very pink of propriety."
Barbara felt herself continually baffled. And yet she could not accept her repulse. There was something she wanted to say to Mr. Harding, or rather, there was a word she wanted him to say to her. If he would but say it she would go, very gladly, for the walls of the room, the heavy atmosphere, and Reynold's eyes, weighed upon her like a nightmare. He had likened her once in his thoughts to a little brown-plumaged bird, and she felt like a bird that afternoon, a bird which had flown into a gloomy cage, and sat, oppressed and fascinated, with a palpitating heart. It seemed to her that his eyes had been upon her ever since she came in, and she wanted a moment's respite.
It came almost as soon as the thought had crossed her mind. Reynold coughed painfully. She started to her feet, not knowing what she ought to do, but a thin hand, lifted in the air, signed to her to be still. Presently the paroxysm subsided.
"Don't you want anything?" she ventured to ask.
He shook his head. After a moment he opened a little box on the table at his elbow, and took out a lozenge. Barbara dared not speak again. She looked at the dull, smouldering fire. "Young man," she said to herself with great distinctness, "Young man, I think you're dying."
She had the saddest heartache as she thought of it. That for her there should be life, London, Paris, the South—who could tell what far-off cities and shores?—who could tell how many years with Adrian? Who could tell what beauty and sweetness and music, what laughter and tears, what dreams and wonders, what joys and sorrows in days to come? While for him, this man with whom she had built castles in the air at Mitchelhurst, there were only four drab walls, a slowly burning fire, and a square grey picture of roofs and chimneys, dim in the foggy air. That was his share of the wide earth! No ease, no love, no joy, no hope,—the mother-world which was to her so bountifully kind, kept nothing for him but a few dull wintry days. Why must this be? And he was so young! And there was so much life everywhere, the earth was full of it, full to overflowing, this busy London was a surging, tumultuous sea of life about them, where they sat in that dim hushed room. She raised her head and looked timidly at the figure opposite, pale as a spectre, half lying, half lolling in his leathern chair, while he sucked his lozenge, and gazed before him with downcast eyes. From him, at least, life had ebbed hopelessly.
"Young man, I think you're dying." Oh, it was cruel, cruel! Barbara's thoughts flashed from the sick room to her own happiness—flashed home. She saw the lawn at Sandmoor, and a certain tennis-player standing in the shade of the big tulip tree, as she had seen him often that summer. He was in his white flannels, he was flushed, smiling, his grey-blue eyes were shining, he swung his racquet in his hand as he talked. He was so handsome and glad and young——ah! but no younger than Reynold Harding! Suppose it had been Adrian, and not Reynold, in the chair yonder, and her happy dreams, instead of being carried forward on the full flood of prosperity, had been left stranded and wrecked, on the low, desolate shore of death. It might have been Adrian passing thus beyond recall, the sun might have been dying out of her heaven, and at the thought she turned away her head, to hide the hot tears which welled into her eyes.
"You are sorry for me," said Reynold.