The pronoun clearly had no reference to Fenwick. Eugénie sat motionless, looking into the fire, her hands on her knee. Lord Findon listened a moment.
'I'm going to my room. Eugénie!—if I could be the slightest use—'
'Dear papa!' she looked up, smiling. 'It's very simple.'
With a muttered exclamation, Lord Findon walked to the further end of the drawing-room, and vanished through an inner door.
The footman announced 'Mr. Welby.'
As soon as the door was shut, Eugénie rose.
Welby hurriedly approached her. 'You say in your note that you have something important to tell me?'
She made a sign of assent, and as he grasped her hand, she allowed herself a moment's pause. Her eyes rested—just perceptibly—on the face of the man whose long devotion to her, expressed through every phase of delicate and passionate service, had brought them both at last to that point where feeling knows itself—where illusions die away—and the deep foundations of our life appear.
Welby's dark face quivered. In the touch of his friend's hand, in the look of her eyes there was that which told him that she had bidden him to no common meeting. The air between them was in an instant alive with memories. Days of first youth; youth's high impressions of great and lovely things; all the innocent, stingless joys of art and travel, of happy talk and ripening faculty, of pure ambitions, hero-worships, compassions, shared and mutually enkindled: these were for ever intertwined with their thoughts of each other.
But much more than these!