“You nervous people! Isn’t it lunch-time?”
As they looked at her she felt they had been talking about her, about her failure. And she felt, too, as if they must be able to see in her eyes that she knew the secret Vere had wished to keep from her and thought she did not know. Emile had given her a glance of intense scrutiny, and the eyes of her child still questioned her with a sort of bright and searching eagerness.
“You make me feel as if I were with detectives,” she said, laughing, but uneasily. “There’s really nothing the matter.”
“And your tooth, Madre? Is it better?”
“Yes, quite well. I am perfectly well. Let us go in.”
Hermione had said to herself that if she could see Emile and Vere together, without any third person, she would know something that she felt she must know. When she was with them she meant to be a watcher. And now her whole being was strung to attention. But it seemed to her that for some reason they, too, were on the alert, and so were not quite natural. And she could not be sure of certain things unless the atmosphere was normal. So she said to herself now, though before she had had the inimitable confidence of woman in certain detective instincts claimed by the whole sex. At one moment the thing she feared—and her whole being recoiled from the thought of it with a shaking disgust—the thing she feared seemed to her fact. Then something occurred to make her distrust herself. And she felt that betraying imagination of hers at work, obscuring all issues, tricking her, punishing her.
And when the meal was over she did not know at all. And she felt as if she had perhaps been deliberately baffled—not, of course, by Vere, of whose attitude she was not, and never had been, doubtful, but by Emile.
When they got up from the table Vere said:
“I’m going to take the siesta.”
“You look remarkably wide awake, Vere,” Artois said, smiling.