“In RETREAT!” Hilda exclaimed. “Ah, yes. How foolish I have been! In retreat,” she repeated softly, flicking a trace of dust from his sleeve. “Of course.”
“It was held in St. Paul's College,” Stephen went on, “by Father Neede. Shall we sit down? And of course at such times no communications reach us, no letters or papers.”
“No letters or papers,” Hilda said, looking at him softly, as it were, through the film of the words. They sat down, he on the sofa, she on a chair very near it. There was another placed at a more usual distance, but she seemed incapable of taking the step or two toward it, away from him.
Stephen gave himself to the grateful sense of her proximity. He had come to sun himself again in the warmth of her fellowship; he was stirred by her emphasis of their separation and reunion. “And what, please,” he asked, “have you been doing? Account to me for the time.”
“While you have been praying and fasting? Wondering what you were at, and waiting for you to finish. Waiting,” she said, and clasped her knees with her intent look again, swaying a little to and fro in her content, as if that which she waited for had already come, full, and very desirable.
“Have you been reading?—”
“Oh, I have been reading nothing! You shall never go into retreat again,” she went on, with a sudden change of expression. “It is well enough for you, but I am not good at fasting. And I have an indulgence,” she added, unaware of her soft, bright audacity, “that will cover both our cases.”
His face uttered aloud his reflection that she was extravagant. That it was a pity, but that what was not due to her profession might be ascribed to the simple, clear impulse of her temperament—that temperament which he had found to be a well of rare sincerity.
“I am not to go any more into retreat?” he said, in grave interrogation; but the hint of rebuke in his voice was not in his heart, and she knew it.
“No!” she cried. “You shall not be hidden away like that. You shall not go alive into the tomb and leave me at the door. Because I cannot bear it.”