“No,” she answered, acquiescing sweetly in the lopping off the head of her bud of reminiscence; “there are enough real virtues and vices, aren’t there, without loading us with mock ones?”
He had led the talk to a safe abstraction, yet already he felt the strain.
“It is settled, then?”—taking for granted with unconscious arbitrariness what she had not said—“8.50.”
To his intense surprise and alarm her answer was to rise from the depths of her chair—what a little slip of a thing she looked in her new mourning! Launce’s description of his sister, “White as a lily and small as a wand,” darted across Edward’s mind—and drawing near him, she laid her hand upon his coat-sleeve. Evidently the keeping at arm’s length would be a harder task than he had promised himself.
“No, it is not settled,” she said; “nothing about it is settled except that you have made one poor creature even more everlastingly your debtor than she was before by proposing it.”
He looked back at her aghast, yet only half believing, unconscious of what at any other moment he would have been tinglingly aware, the clasp of her fingers on his arm. He knew her to be so complete a liar, that the mere fact of her announcing that she did not purpose to return to Stillington was, as likely as not, to mean that she had every intention of doing so. Was this refusal one of her infinite wiles to lure him into cajoling and caressing her into compliance?
“Am I to understand that you have made other plans?” His voice was frosty; too frosty, perhaps, or it seemed so to himself, for he added more in his own manner, “I beg your pardon for what may sound like an impertinent intrusion, but you have taken me by surprise.”
The chill in his tone had loosened her clasp upon his sleeve, and they stood near but apart from one another.
“I am going to stay with the Slammers.”