“Let me do that for you,” he said gently. In her nervousness Eugenia had already done the very thing she would have wished not to do. She had stirred the glowing red into a vivid blaze, which fell full on her face. Something in it must have looked different from usual, for before she could turn away, Gerald spoke.
“Eugenia, what is the matter?” he exclaimed impulsively. “You are as cold as ice—you must be ill.”
She felt his eyes fixed upon her: extreme annoyance gave her momentary strength.
“Don’t, Gerald, please, don’t,” she said, half beseechingly, half petulantly. “There is nothing the matter. I may have got a chill, that is all. But please don’t look at me. I do so dislike it.”
She rose, resolved to put an end to his scrutiny. “I will get across the room,” she thought. She made two or three steps feebly but determinedly, wondering vaguely what had come to her feet, they felt so powerless and heavy; then, it seemed to her, she stepped suddenly down, down into unfathomable depths, into darkness compared to which midnight was as noon-day. “I am dying,” she thought to herself before her senses quite deserted her. “What will he think, how will he feel when he hears it?” And it seemed to her she called aloud with her last breath. “Beauchamp! oh, Beauchamp!”
In reality the words were a barely audible whisper, which would certainly have been unintelligible to ears less jealously sharp than those of her one hearer.
“My darling,” muttered Gerald, “so it is his doing, is it?”
The first two words made their way to Eugenia’s not yet quite unconscious brain. Afterwards she thought she must have dreamt that Beauchamp had answered her cry.
She had never fainted before. She could not at all understand the painful coming back to life; to finding herself after all—instead of awaking in the mysterious country across the river of which we know so little, so terribly little—in the old way again, lying on the drawing-room sofa, with a keen cold current of air blowing in her face.
“Where am I?” she said, as people always do say in such circumstances, glancing round her, apprehensively. But before Gerald had time to reply, her wits had sufficiently recovered themselves to take in the position.