The bed is in a recess of the room, and the window-blind, partly drawn down in defence against the westering blaze, confuses Miss Carew’s sight; besides which her feet have halted near the threshold to allow time for her own introduction, so that she hears the voice before she sees the face of the wounded man.
“Miss Carew has come to see you!” Féodorovna explains, in a tiresome carneying voice, leaning over the pillows. “But you must send her away the moment you are tired of her; and you must not let her talk to you about anything that is not quite pleasant and cheerful.”
Thus agreeably heralded by an implication of her own morose garrulity, Lavinia approaches the invalid, hearing his answer, “I am exceedingly grateful to her,” before she sees his face.
Often and often, in after-days, the fact that his first words concerning her were an expression of gratitude recurs to her with a sense of the keenest irony.
“Do you wish to be tête-à-tête?” asks Féodorovna, when the whole and the sick have silently touched each other’s hands; “or had you rather I would stay?” and the answer, courteous in its subtlety—
“I am sure that you ought to rest; I am ashamed to think of how much you have been doing for me to-day,” is divined by Lavinia to be not what the asker had expected.
However, without flagrant breach of her own axiom, that a sick man is not to be thwarted, she cannot avoid compliance, and with an officious parting question, “Where shall she sit? Would you like her to be beside you, or where you can see her better?” and a final fussing over phials and drinks, takes her cap, her apron, and her cuffs away.
A sense of relief at her departure, coupled with a strong, shy impulse to follow her, and that again with a far stronger one to snatch another look at the just-glanced-at face of him for whom Bill had died, join to silence Lavinia for the first moment or two. That the wish to be acquainted with each other’s features must be reciprocal, is proved by the sick man’s first words—
“Would you mind sitting in that chair?”
Her eyes first seek, then follow the direction of his, to see which chair he means; and by the time she sits down obediently in it, they both know—will know to the end of their lives—what each looks like.