Radowitz grew paler still as he reached Connie. He gave Falloden a short, embarrassed greeting, and then subsided into the chair that Constance offered him. The thought crossed Falloden’s mind—“Did she arrange this?”
Her face gave little clue—though she could not restrain one quick, hesitating glance at Falloden. She pressed tea on Radowitz, who accepted it to please her, and then, schooled as she was in all the minor social arts, she had soon succeeded in establishing a sort of small talk among the three. Falloden, self-conscious, and on the rack, could not imagine why he stayed. But this languid boy had ministered to his dying father! And to what, and to whom, were the languor, the tragic physical change due? He stayed—in purgatory—looking out for any chance to escape.
“Did you walk all the way?”
The note in Connie’s voice was softly reproachful.
“Why, it’s only three miles!” said Radowitz, as though defending himself, but he spoke with an accent of depression. And Connie remembered how, in the early days of his recovery from his injury, he had spent hours rambling over the moors by himself, or with Sorell. Her heart yearned to him. She would have liked to take his poor hands in hers, and talk to him tenderly like a sister. But there was that other dark face, and those other eyes opposite—watching. And to them too, her young sympathy went out—how differently!—how passionately! A kind of rending and widening process seemed to be going on within her own nature. Veils were falling between her and life; and feelings, deeper and stronger than any she had ever known, were fast developing the woman in the girl. How to heal Radowitz!—how to comfort Falloden! Her mind ached under the feelings that filled it—feelings wholly disinterested and pure.
“You really are taking the Boar’s Hill cottage?” she asked, addressing Radowitz.
“I think so. It is nearly settled. But I am trying to find some companion. Sorell can only come occasionally.”
As he spoke, a wild idea flashed into Falloden’s brain. It seemed to have entered without—or against—his will; as though suggested by some imperious agency outside himself. His intelligence laughed at it. Something else in him entertained it—breathlessly.
Radowitz stooped down to try and tempt Lady Marcia’s dachshund with a piece of cake.
“I must anyhow have a dog,” he said, as the pampered Max accepted the cake, and laid his head gratefully on the donor’s knee; “they’re always company.”