“I hope you are not angry now, at least!” was the answer, spoken with eager anxiety. “But I would rather think you had been angry than believe that you were quite indifferent as to whether I came or not!”
“I am not—indifferent!” Maud Pomeroy paused. There was no colour at all in her cheeks now, and her lips were drawn together in a hard, thin line such as no one had ever seen on her face before. There was a dead silence. A sudden stillness had come over Julian’s figure as he stood also leaning against the balustrade, but with his back to the water. His hand was clenched fiercely against the stone.
“I have no right to be angry with you,” Maud Pomeroy went on; her voice was thin and hard as if its steadiness was the result of deliberate effort. “I have no rights at all. If I had——” She let her voice die away again with deliberate intention.
The silence that followed had something ghastly in it. At last, with his face as white as death, and keeping his eyes fixed steadily before him, Julian moved.
“You will catch cold, I’m afraid!” he said, a little hoarsely. “Shall we go in?”
Without a single word Miss Pomeroy moved also and retraced her steps up the alley. For one moment, and for one moment only, her face was no longer that of a gentle and amiable girl, but of a spiteful and vindictive woman.
CHAPTER IV
More than one of the people who had talked to Mrs. Romayne in the interval had been vaguely aware of a certain incontrollable preoccupation behind her manner; though the intense, suppressed excitement in which that preoccupation originated passed undetected. Her restless eyes fastened upon Miss Pomeroy and Julian on the very instant of their reappearance in the room, and as they came towards her that excitement leapt up suddenly and lit up her whole face with a wild flash of hope and anticipation. They drew nearer and it died down again even more suddenly than it had sprung up; and in its passing it seemed to have aged her face curiously, and to have left upon it a stamp of heart-sick disappointment, touched with a creeping anxiety. Miss Pomeroy was pale, and her usual still placidity seemed to be accentuated into absolute stupidity. Julian’s face was quite colourless, and beneath the travesty of his usual manner which he assumed in speaking to his mother, there was an indefinable expression which made him look ten years older and twenty years harder and more bitter.
Scruples on his part as to crushing their dress prevented his going home with them. He would follow in a hansom, he said. But before he arrived Miss Pomeroy had said good night to Mrs. Romayne with a neatly-turned and quite meaningless expression of the pleasure the evening had given her, and had retired to her room. Mrs. Romayne, looking haggard and worn, lingered until Julian came in, and went out to meet him.