Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the most beautiful and one of the most irrelevant things he had ever seen.
'I will write to you, Elsmere,' he said, holding out his hand, 'speech is impossible to me. I never had any words except through my pen.'
Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left alone.
But he did no more packing for hours. He spent the middle of the day sitting dumb and immovable in his chair. Imagination was at work again more feverishly than ever. He was tortured by a fixed image of Rose, suffering and paling.
And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus of this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life had been so long purely intellectual that this sudden strain of passion and fierce practical interests seemed to unhinge him, to destroy his mental balance.
He bethought him. This afternoon he knew she had a last rehearsal at Searle House. Afterwards her custom was to come back from St. James's Park to High Street, Kensington, and walk up the hill to her own home. He knew it, for on two occasions after these rehearsals he had been at Lerwick Gardens, waiting for her, with Agnes and Mrs. Leyburn. Would she go this afternoon? A subtle instinct told him that she would.
It was nearly six o'clock that evening when Rose, stepping out from the High Street station, crossed the main road and passed into the darkness of one of the streets leading up the hill. She had forced herself to go, and she would go alone. But as she toiled along she felt weary and bruised all over. She carried with her a heart of lead—a sense of utter soreness—a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only thing that dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of inconsequent memory of Mr. Flaxman's manner at the rehearsal. Had she looked so ill? She flushed hotly at the thought, and then realised again, with a sense of childish comfort, the kind look and voice, the delicate care shown in shielding her from any unnecessary exertion, the brotherly grasp of the hand with which he had put her into the cab that took her to the Underground.
Suddenly, where the road made a dark turn to the right, she saw a man standing. As she came nearer she saw that it was Langham.
'You!' she cried, stopping.