Mrs. Romayne had been looking vaguely about the room, evidently bestowing a modicum of her attention only on Falconer. But as he spoke the last words the slightest possible start passed through her frame and her wandering eyes suddenly ceased to wander. There was a moment’s pause, and then she turned them on Falconer’s face.
“Really? And when do you go?”
There was something rather odd beneath the carelessness of her voice, and her eyes, as she fixed them on Falconer’s, were odd too.
“I hope to leave England early in October.”
Mrs. Romayne made no reply. Her face suggested curiously that the actual exigencies of the situation had faded for her, that she was not in the present at all. For the moment there was no trace of that satisfaction and relief which would have been the natural consummation, on such news, of the defiance and distaste so hardly repressed in her manner to her “connexion” during the past year. She looked, apparently unconsciously, into the grave, steady man’s face above her, and there was a vague, half-formed expression in her eyes, which might have been a suddenly-stirred sense of loneliness or foreboding.
It was gone again in an instant. And as the man who was to take her in to lunch approached her, she turned from Falconer with the lightest possible “au revoir.”
Falconer found himself very well situated at luncheon. A question came up on which his word carried weight, and the discussion which ensued brought home to him that sense of renewed power and standing in the world so grateful to him after his long period of inaction. He was full of grave content and satisfaction, when, after lunch, circumstances threw him again with Mrs. Romayne; and his whole mental attitude was suffused with a dignified kindliness. He began to speak at once with grave, but not unfriendly interest, and as though he were conscious of a certain remissness.
“I am glad to hear of your son! I hope it is quite satisfactory to you?”
Mrs. Romayne had acknowledged his vicinity with a conventional word and smile. Circumstances demanded of her at the moment no active exertion; she was standing aside, as it were, for the instant, and there were tired lines faintly visible about her mouth. They disappeared, however, as if by magic, beneath the hard intentness which leapt into her face as she turned sharply to Falconer on his first words. The movement was apparently involuntary, for she turned away, lifting with elaborate carelessness the long eye-glasses which she had lately adopted, as though to cover the first movement, and said, as she looked through them at something at the other end of the room:
“It’s very stupid of me, no doubt, but I must ask you to explain!”