'Pray heaven,' he said with a groan, getting up to go, 'you may not have made her miserable already!'
'Did it hurt her so much?' asked Langham almost inaudibly, turning away, Robert's tone meanwhile calling up a new and scorching image in the subtle brain tissue.
'I have not seen her,' said Robert abruptly; 'but when I came in I found my wife—who has no light tears—weeping for her sister.'
His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in truth too pitiful and too intimate for speech.
Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask again.
'Good-bye!' said Robert, taking up his hat with a dismal sense of having got foolishly through a fool's errand. 'As I said to you before, what Rose's feeling is at this moment I cannot even guess. Very likely she would be the first to repudiate half of what I have been saying. And I see that you will not talk to me—you will not take me into your confidence and speak to me not only as her brother but as your friend. And—and—are you going? What does this mean?'
He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases.
'I am going back to Oxford,' said the other briefly. 'I cannot stay in these rooms, in these streets.'
Robert was sore perplexed. What real—nay, what terrible suffering—in the face and manner, and yet how futile, how needless! He felt himself wrestling with something intangible and phantom-like, wholly unsubstantial, and yet endowed with a ghastly indefinite power over human life.
'It is very hard,' he said hurriedly, moving nearer, 'that our old friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a little! You are always undervaluing yourself. Why not take a friend into council sometimes when you sit in judgment on yourself and your possibilities? Your own perceptions are all warped!'