A pause.
Lavinia can go no farther than this bald assent in praise of her chosen friend, for the oppression of shyness that crushes and gags her. It is of this metamorphosed, dressed, transformed man, passing so visibly out of the province of the nurse, despite his crutches and his pallor, that she feels a timidity none the less overmastering for her knowledge of its senselessness. That he sees it, the uncertainty of the tone which utters what sounds like a reproach sufficiently proves.
“Why were you so unwilling to own that you knew my Christian names? It was not a very compromising admission.”
“Not very,” she answers with a wavering laugh; “but to-day I feel as if I must sit up, and ‘make strange’ with you. The person I knew lay meekly flat on his back, and did not dare to call his soul his own; when he sits up and gives a party, I realize that my jurisdiction has ended.”
“Has it?”
The question is followed by a silence so full of electricity that both feel the necessity of running up a lightning conductor. Both begin a sentence at the same moment, and each breaks it off on realizing the other’s intention. Each begs the other to continue the interrupted phrase, and each asseverates that it was not worth ending. It is Binning who is finally persuaded to reissue from his mint the coin whose valuelessness he has spent so much breath in asserting.
“I was only going to say that if I have already become such a bogey—so unrecognizable—when once I am on my legs again, I shall have to be formally reintroduced to you.”
“It will not be worth while.” Even as she makes it Lavinia realizes the folly of her speech, opening up, as it does, the subject of their fast-approaching separation; but before her forces can come up to relieve it, the traitor within her has rushed the position, and once again the electric current runs perilously strong.
* * * * *
As the young Darcys have always been taught to say what they mean, and mean what they say, they credit their acquaintance with a like simplicity and veracity; and, having been invited by Captain Binning to come again soon, and bring the Siege Train, see no reason why they should not repeat their visit in compliance with a request, whose sincerity it never occurs to them to doubt, with the least possible delay. Thanks to the drag placed upon their ardour by a discreeter parent, a decent interval of three or four days is allowed to elapse before they reappear in triumph, equipped with all the munitions of war.