She smiled and nodded to him, and to Mrs. Halse and Miss Newton, and moved away to speak to some other people.
About a quarter of an hour later Falconer, who was a somewhat grim ornament to society in the interval, saw her coming smiling towards him.
“Ready?” she said. “That’s very nice of you! Suppose we go, then?”
He followed her out of the room and down the stairs, her flow of comments and laughter never ceasing; put her into her carriage, and got in himself.
“Home!” she said sharply to the coachman. The door banged, they rolled away into the darkness and the wet, and her voice stopped suddenly.
They rolled along for a few minutes in total silence. Shut up alone with her like that, the isolation and quiet following so suddenly on the crowd and noise of a moment before, Falconer’s only conscious feeling was one of almost stupid discomfort. Her sudden silence, too, had an indefinable but very unpleasant effect upon him. At last he said with awkward displeasure:
“I was going to write to you! I——”
She lifted her hand quickly and stopped him.
“When we get in!” she said in a quick, tense voice. “You can come in? It is just six. It need not take long.”
“I am quite at your service.”