"Oh, I do hope that they'll be able to hear something."
"Yes." George looked round the room and held out his hand. "I promised your mother I wouldn't do more than put my nose in at the door."
"But I want you to stay!"
"And, dearest Babs, you know that's what I want to do more than anything in the world. But I mustn't tire you, and you mustn't tempt me." He lifted her hands from the sheets and bent quickly to kiss them. "You poor child!"
Barbara felt that this time she must explain, if she was not to be maddened with sympathy.
"You mustn't pity me, George," she began.
"I pity any one who's in suspense.... The colonel's absolutely convinced that Jack's all right. Good-bye, Babs."
As he turned abruptly and hurried out of the room, Barbara covered her eyes. George was not only fond of her, he was in love with her; and he had come on purpose to encourage her, against his own interests, with hopes of Jack's safety. There was a dramatic irony in his coming; there would be a further dramatic irony, if she fell in love with him for his sympathy about Jack and then heard that Jack was safe and sound. Or, indeed, if she fell in love with any one else. Because she was overwrought and full of fancies, the shadow of the man in the train was more real than George's substance; the one voice she could remember and reproduce, but George's might have belonged to anybody.... This was her old fear of the punishment which Providence had in store for her, the image of herself passionately reaching out towards some one and finding her way barred by Jack's inexorable ghost.
Suspense. "I pity any one who's in suspense."... It was the uncertainty of the last year which had worn down her strength. And Lady Loring told her to be patient.... Barbara's mind went back to her dinner of a week before and to Amy's chance reference to a new clairvoyant. Mrs. Savage of Knightsbridge.... No other address had been given, but she could find that from Sonia. All her life Barbara had treated impulse as a thing to be welcomed, a hint from destiny, a voice from the darkness. When she awoke next morning, it was to wonder why she had waited so long. On the first day that she was allowed out of the house she went by herself to Knightsbridge and asked, without giving her name, for an interview.