“What is the matter?” asked Beauchamp, presently. “What are you looking so unhappy about?”
“I am tired,” she answered hastily. “I have got a little headache. I wish I could get a cup of tea, but I suppose there would be no chance of such a thing so late in the evening.”
“Every chance,” replied he; and for one happy moment Miss Eyrecourt thought he was going to volunteer an expedition in search of it. “If you will wait till the supper is over I will guarantee your getting it. I am so sorry you are tired, Roma, but I have not thought you looking well for some time. You may have fancied I did not notice your looks or think about you, but if so you have been mistaken.”
There was the unmistakable tone of a prelude in this little speech. Roma grew desperate, as a last hope she tried to offend him.
“I am not obliged to you for noticing my looks,” she said haughtily—“still less for commenting upon them. There are few things I dislike more than remarks of the kind. I am tired, as I told you, Beauchamp, and I want to sit here quietly by myself. It will oblige me very much if you will go away and leave me alone.”
Captain Chancellor had risen from his seat and stood before her, looking down on her flushed face, waiting quietly till she had come to the end of her not very civil speech. He was perfectly cool. Roma hardly understood the expression of his face, but she felt that, so far at least in the interview, he had the advantage of her.
“You needn’t think you will make me angry, and get rid of me in that way, Roma,” he said coolly. “You have tried that plan successfully several times, but I understand you better now, I am glad to say. Yes, I understand you thoroughly now at last, and I will have no more mystifications and shillyshallying.”
It was a peculiar sort of love-making. There was a tone of triumph in his way of speaking that irritated Miss Eyrecourt even while it bewildered her.
“What do you mean, Beauchamp?” she asked, really at a loss to understand what he was driving at.
“You know what I mean,” he answered; and Roma could see that he put some force on himself to keep down his rising irritation. “You know perfectly what I mean. Not many hours ago you told Gertrude you were willing to make a sacrifice of yourself for her,” (this was what after much cogitation Captain Chancellor had made out of Floss’s “satin flies,” and the look of utter astonishment on Roma’s face told him that his shot had hit the mark); “have you forgotten that you were sacrificing some one else as well as yourself? All these years, Roma, I have waited, if not always patiently, at least, more so than many men would have done,” (“yes,” thought Roma, “and amused yourself very agreeably between times,”) “and now I think I deserve my reward. I have always suspected what I now know, that Gertrude was the real difficulty; but for this suspicion your conduct would certainly have been most incomprehensible to me, still till to-day I hardly realised that she could carry her unjustifiable tyranny so far, or that you could so tamely yield to it.”