Now remorse shot through him, fierce and stinging—remorse and terror! Then on their heels followed an angry denial of responsibility, mingled with alarm and revolt. Was he to be robbed of Lucy because Eleanor had misread him? No doubt she had imprinted what she pleased on Lucy's mind. Was he indeed undone?—for good and all?
Then shame, pity, rushed upon him headlong. He dared not look at the face beside him with its record of pain. He tried to put out of his mind what it meant. Of course he must accept her lead. He was only too eager to accept it; to play the game as she pleased. She was mistress! That he realised.
He took up the camp-stool on which he had been sitting when she arrived and placed himself beside her.
'Well—that explains something'—he said more gently. 'I can't complain that I don't seem to you or anyone a miracle of discretion; I can't wonder—perhaps—that you should wish to protect Miss Foster, if—if you thought she needed protecting. But I must think—I can't help thinking, that you set about it with very unnecessary violence. And for yourself too—what madness! Eleanor! what have you been doing to yourself?'
He looked at her reproachfully with that sudden and intimate penetration which was one of his chief spells with women. Eleanor shrank.
'Oh! I am ill,' she said hastily; 'too ill in fact to make a fuss about. It would only be a waste of time.'
'Of course you have found this place too rough for you. Have you any comforts at all in that ruin? Eleanor, what a rash,—what a wild thing to do!'
He came closer to her, and Eleanor trembled under the strong expostulating tenderness of his face and voice. It was so like him—to be always somehow in the right! Would he succeed, now as always, in doing with her exactly as he would? And was it not this, this first and foremost that she had fled from?
'No'—she said,—'no. I have been as well here as I should have been anywhere else. Don't let us talk of it.'
'But I must talk of it. You have hurt yourself—and Heaven knows you have hurt me—desperately. Eleanor—when I came back from that function the day you left the Villa, I came back with the intention of telling you everything. I knew you were Miss Foster's friend. I thought you were mine too. In spite of all my stupidity about the book, Eleanor, you would have listened to me?—you would have advised me?'