"I say, but wouldn't you mind?" he said at last.
"Why should I?" said she.
In the afternoon of the next day, which was a Sunday, Brodrick appeared at the house in Augustus Road. He asked to see Miss Collett, who was staying there with her cousin.
She came to him, as she used to come to him in his study, with her uplifted, sacrificial face, holding herself stiffly and tensely, half in surrender, half resisting the impulse that drew her.
He laid the situation before her, curtly.
"If you were to come back," he said, "it would solve all our problems."
She reddened, suspecting, as was her way, significance in everything that Brodrick said. Did he, she wondered, recognize that she too had her problem; and was he providing for her too the simple and beautiful solution? It was possible, then, she argued inwardly, that in some way that was not any other man's way, in some immaterial and perfect way, he cared. There was after all a tie. He desired, as she had desired, to preserve it in its purity and its perfection.
Putting all that aside, it remained certain that she was indispensable.
There was a deepening in the grey shallows of her eyes; they darted such light as comes only from the deeps. Her upper lip quivered with a movement that was between a tremor and a smile, subtler than either.
"Are you sure," she said, "that Mrs. Brodrick wouldn't mind?"