Dennis Falconer was looking very pale; there was little colour even in his lips, and his face was set and stern. He took the hand Mrs. Romayne held out to him, and replied to her greeting in the briefest possible phrase, with no softening of a something curiously solemn and inexorable about his demeanour, though his eyes rested on her for an instant with a singular expression. He disliked and despised the woman before him, and yet at that moment he pitied her.
“Sit down!” she said. “I am charmed to see you, though, do you know, you have chosen an inopportune moment. I had a very pleasant engagement for this afternoon, and I nearly put you off. So I hope the business is really very grave.”
Her voice was lightness itself, and that very lightness, with the almost unusual loquacity with which she had received him, seemed to witness to the presence in her mind of a recollection which she was determined to ignore—the recollection of their last interview, in that very room. There was an air about her of having entrenched herself behind a barrier which she defied him to pass; of being resolute this time against surprise, or against any other method of attack.
“It is very grave!” said Falconer, and in contrast with her voice, his rang with stern heaviness. “I must ask you to prepare yourself for bad news!”
“Bad news!” she echoed sharply, as her eyes, fixed on his face, grew suddenly bright and keen. “Oh—money, I suppose?” Her voice jarred a little, though she spoke very lightly.
“No!” said Falconer.
His tone was absolutely uncompromising. On his unsympathetic and unimaginative mind the effect of her manner was to obliterate his sense of pity beneath a consciousness of the retributive justice of the moment before her.
“Not money?” she said, with a little, unreal laugh. “Well, that’s a comfort, at any rate.” Her hand had clenched itself suddenly round the arm of her chair on his monosyllable, and now she paused a moment, almost as though her breath had failed her, before she said, with affected carelessness: “And if not—what?”
Her back was towards the light, and Falconer could not see her face.
“I will answer your question, if you will allow me, with another,” he said. “Have you noticed anything unusual in the course of the past month—or more—in the conduct of your son?”