His tone tells her that the temptation is strong upon him too, and his action, in adding two or three more yards to those she has already set between them, that in deadly struggle he is grappling with it. If she were his true love, would not she come to his aid? With a prodigious effort she clears the red mist from before her eyes, and steadies the trembling in her traitorous hands. Then, rejoining him, and beginning to resume the walk that their charmed ears had first interrupted, she says, in a tone to whose cheerfulness she tries with all the force of her will-power not to give a hysterical ring—
“After all, there is a good deal to be glad of, if one comes to think of it—your recovery, your Victoria Cross——”
“Yes,” indistinctly; but with an effort, whose suffering manliness she recognizes, to follow her lead—“yes; I am a sweep to complain!”
It nerves her to new effort. “Was not Féodorovna very much excited at your getting it?” her terror of herself driving her on into a torrent of trivial questions. “How is Féodorovna? is she yellow still?”
“No; not at all.”
“Is she quite herself again?—quite recovered?”
“She is supposed to be.”
“But you think that she is not?”
“I think she is—rather—hysterical.”
Lavinia’s feverish trickle of inquiry drops into silence. Between the lines of his brief words, and in the constraint of his tone, she reads that the method adopted by Miss Prince to show her hysteria has been to throw herself into his arms, as she had done by letter into General ——’s, and has volunteered to follow him round the globe, as she had generously done in the case of his predecessor. Well, she herself has been within an ace of a similar action during the last five minutes. She ought, therefore, to feel a sympathy for the same abandonment on the part of another. And yet, although Miss Carew knows, as well as if she had been present at the drama, that Féodorovna has remained in Binning’s arms not a moment longer than the space of time needed for him to find a chair in which to deposit her, yet a dizzying jealousy seizes her at the thought that, though only for a minute, and deeply against the will of the object of her amorous demonstration, Miss Prince has lain on that breast whose pulsing against her own Lavinia will never feel.