The days passed by. Winnington did as he had been told; and Madeleine Tonbridge seemed to see that Delia was dumbly grateful to him. Meanwhile in the eyes of her two friends she made little or no advance towards recapturing her former health and strength. The truth, of course, was that she was consumed by devouring and helpless anxiety. She wrote to Lathrop, posting the letter at a distant village; and received no answer. Then she ascertained that he was not at the cottage, and a casual line in the Tocsin informed her that he had been in town taking part in the foundation of an "outspoken" newspaper—outspoken on "the fundamental questions of sex, liberty, and morals involved in the suffrage movement."
But a letter addressed "To be forwarded" to the Tocsin office produced no more result than her first. Meanwhile she had written imploringly to various prominent members of the organisation in London pointing out the effect on public opinion that must be produced all through Southern England by any attack on Monk Lawrence. She received two cold and cautious replies. It seemed to her that the writers of them were even more in the dark than she.
The days ran on. The newspapers were full of the coming Woman Suffrage Bill, and its certain defeat in the Commons. Sir Wilfrid Lang was leading the forces hostile to the Suffrage, and making speech after speech in the country to cheering audiences, denouncing the Bill, and the mad women who had tried to promote it by a campaign of outrage, "as ridiculous as it was criminal." He was to move the rejection of it on the second reading, and was reported to be triumphantly confident of the result.
Winnington meanwhile became more and more conscious of an abnormal state of nerve and brain in this pale Delia, the shadow of her proper self, and as the hours went on, he was presently for throwing all Madeleine's counsels aside, and somehow breaking through the girl's silence, in the hope of getting at—and healing—the cause of it. He guessed of course at a hundred things to account for it—at a final breach between her and Gertrude—at the disappointment of cherished hopes and illusions—at a profound travail of mind, partly moral, partly intellectual, going back over the past, and bewildered as to the future. But at the first sign of a change of action, of any attempt to probe her, on his part, she was off—in flight; throwing back at him often a look at once so full of pain and so resolute that he dared not pursue her. She possessed at all times a great personal dignity, and it held him at bay.
He himself—unconsciously—enabled her to hold him at bay. Naturally, he connected some of the haunting anxiety he perceived with Monk Lawrence, and with Gertrude Marvell's outrageous speech in Latchford market-place. But he himself, on the other hand, was not greatly concerned for Monk Lawrence. Not only he—-the whole neighbourhood was on the alert, in defence of the famous treasure-house. The outside of the building and the gardens were patrolled at night by two detectives; and according to Daunt's own emphatic assurance to Winnington, the house was never left without either the Keeper himself or his niece in it, to mount guard. They had set up a dog, with a bark which was alone worth a policeman. And finally, Sir Wilfrid himself had been down to see the precautions taken, had especially ordered the strengthening of the side door, and the provision of iron bars for all the ground floor windows. As to the niece, Eliza Daunt, she had not made herself popular with the neighbours or in the village; but she seemed an efficient and managing woman, and that she "kept herself to herself" was far best for the safety of Monk Lawrence.
Whenever during these days Winnington's business took him in the Latchford direction, so that going or coming he passed Monk Lawrence, he would walk up to the Abbey in the evening, and in the course of the gossip of the day, all the reassuring news he had to give would be sure to drop out; while Delia sat listening, her eyes fixed on him. And then, for a time, the shadow almost lifted, and she would be her young and natural self.
In this way, without knowing it, he helped her to keep her secret, and, intermittently, to fight down her fears.
On one of these afternoons, in the February twilight, he had been talking to both the ladies, describing inter alia a brief call at Monk Lawrence and a chat with Daunt, when Madeleine Tonbridge went away to change her walking dress, and he and Delia were left alone. Winnington was standing in the favourite male attitude—his hands in his pockets, and his back to the fire; Delia was on a sofa near. The firelight flickered on the black and white of her dress, and on the face which in losing something of its dark bloom had gained infinitely in other magic for the eyes of the man looking down upon her.
Suddenly she said—
"Do you remember when you wanted me to say—I was sorry for Gertrude's speech—and I wouldn't?"