She gave him a startled look, her heart warming toward him. She knew well enough why he had refused.
“I’ve asked to have Faunce go,” he went on. “There’s no question of that, if she—if she——”
“It isn’t that with her!” Fanny interrupted.
“I thought you said you hadn’t seen her?”
“I haven’t, but I’m a woman, and I—I know that much myself!”
He stood looking at her, a little reassured, but with a keen subconsciousness that recalled Diane’s white face and her outstretched hands when she pushed him away. He had believed then that she loved Faunce. On that belief, to shelter her, he had tried to shield Faunce, and had surrendered his chance to command the new expedition, only to find that Diane had left her husband!
It was inexplicable, but his heart leaped up with a sudden and unchastened hope. He had been plunged into misery, he had given up, and now, suddenly, as if a window had been opened in a dark room and the light of day let in, he caught a glimpse of the horizon. It awoke hopes that he had extinguished, it renewed thoughts that he had tried to drive out. After attaining the bleak immunity of despair, he was plunged back again into the turmoil of passion.
He could not find words to answer Fanny, and he was glad to see the black-clad figure of the little dean emerging from the golden glow on the campus and approaching at a rapid gait. It meant a resumption of the commonplace and a little while to recover the equilibrium he had lost.
XXVIII
It was with a feeling of intense bewilderment that Overton finally left the seminary. Dr. Price had refrained from any reference to Diane, but in his very caution in avoiding the subject there was something that made his visitor more eager to fathom the little dean’s innocent reservations. Fanny, having fired her shot at random, had become as quiet as a mouse, scarcely responding to her father’s efforts to draw her into the conversation; but there was a subtle suggestion of something important, of some tragic climax, in the very atmosphere.