“Yes,” he replied; “the day before yesterday I turned up again. You’ve been away too, I hear?”
“Oh dear, yes; for ever so long. I left before you did. Indeed, I did not know till my return that you had not been here all the time.”
“We seem wonderfully interested in each other’s movements,” observed Frank, as they walked on, with rather an awkward laugh. He evidently, for some reason or other, did not feel particularly comfortable in his present society.
Ralph did not reply, and for a minute or two there was silence. Suddenly the same uncontrollable impulse again seized him, and he did not resist it.
“It’s absurd,” he thought, “going on in this way. It will be a ghastly satisfaction to hear it confirmed by his own lips.”
He turned to Frank.
“Excuse me, Berwick, if I am premature—I have certainly not yet heard it formally announced—but—I am right, am I not, in congratulating you?”
Frank looked confused and exceedingly surprised. A cloud of not small annoyance began to creep up over his handsome face.
“You must excuse me, Severn, but I haven’t the remotest idea what you are talking about. ‘Congratulate me.’ On what, pray?”
It was intensely disagreeable for Ralph. The last man on earth to pry into, or gossip about his neighbours’ affairs; who, indeed, carried to such an extreme his sensitive horror of intrusion, his shy avoidance of all matters of personal interest, that, in a general way, his nearest friend might have lost a fortune or gained a wife without his appearing to have heard of the event. He would have given worlds to have made some half apology, to have shuffled out of it with some muttered words of “must have been a mistake,” or “only a piece of the usual Altes gossip, which Captain Berwick must excuse.”