A stinging curiosity goads the other on to a second question—
“And you—how did you take it?”
“I told him how greatly I admired his disinterestedness,” replies Miss Prince, with perfectly regained equanimity, adding, with a touch of the hereditarily commercial spirit, shrewd even in adversity. “It would, of course, have been very advantageous for him from a material point of view.”
“And—and that was all? It ended there?”
To only the sharpened eye of jealous suspicion would the tiny hesitation that precedes the answer to this question be perceptible.
“Ye—es, it ended there.”
Past the power of even Féodorovna is it to confess to the precise method in which she had closed the interview; and Lavinia knows that she will never learn at what stage of the indubitably offered and as indubitably refused embrace—whether at that of mere intention or ripe accomplishment it had been arrested by its object. Féodorovna had given her last response without looking her questioner quite in the face, and her eye now rests on the church tower and the blossoming horse-chestnuts with a real, if exasperating, sadness in it.
“I told him if ever he reconsidered his decision, that whatever might be the lapse of time, whatever else changed, I should not.”
The unassuming fidelity that voice and words claim is clearly felt by their possessor to be so beautiful that Lavinia asks herself, in a topsy-turvy whirl of confused wretchedness, whether it is not really so? but the thought—if it deserves such a name—is chased a few moments later, as with a whip of small cords, out of her soul by a far more smarting suggestion.
“Well, good-bye. I am going away this afternoon to a quiet little fishing village in Suffolk, to be quite alone with myself; so perhaps I shall not see you again till the wedding. But, after all, that is only six days off!”