With native caution he did not pledge himself to stay at Lashmar for a specified time; that would depend on Jack, on Barbara, on his own work and a dozen other things. It was essential that he should keep himself posted regularly in Jack's movements, and he walked over to Red Roofs on the morrow of his arrival. Agnes gave him all the information that she possessed, but gave it with reservation, as though she were conferring a favour; and, when he left, she walked with him to the gate of the woods and blurted out that she was engaged to Dick Benyon. As he congratulated her, Eric remembered their last parting by the sun-dial, when she had told him not to worry even if gossiping papers coupled his name with Barbara's, when she had pointed out, too, that they could end the gossip in a day by ceasing to meet. She did not seem extravagantly happy; each had lost the other without finding the perfect substitute; but Agnes, with greater wisdom than he had ever shewn towards Barbara, had resolved that a secondary place was not enough.
After that he avoided the Warings, but Sybil returned one night from Red Roofs with a report that Jack was expected there within three days. He had seen a specialist in London and was forbidden to attempt any brain-work for three months; even the easy experiment in Paris had been a mistake. Eric's mind was busy with excuses to get back to London, for with Jack as his neighbour, invalided and bored, it would be necessary to see him daily. The Lanes were, fortunately, too much absorbed in their own life to be suspicious of sudden changes in Eric's plans; affectionate regret greeted his announcement that he was returning to London after the week-end, and his sense of the dramatic was grimly amused by the thought that his train would pass Jack's somewhere between Basingstoke and Brooklands.… He might almost be a criminal fleeing from justice.
A note from Jack lay on his hall table, regretting that they had not met, but promising to walk over to the Mill-House the moment that he arrived. It was followed by another, full of mock-indignation.
"If you don't want to see me, you needn't," he wrote. "But for Heaven's sake don't bolt to the country the minute you hear I'm coming to London and then bolt back to London the minute you hear I'm going to the country."
Of course it was all badinage; and yet, if Jack knew everything, the badinage might cover an atrocious hint of his knowledge.…
"I'm losing my sense of reality!" Eric muttered.
The same post brought him a long letter from his mother. Jack had come to tea on the day of his arrival looking very well, on the whole, though the wound on his head was still visible.
"He wants to see you," wrote Lady Lane, "and he particularly asked when you would be down here again. I'm afraid poor Jack is in for rather a dull time. He was hoping so much to be well enough to work, and the sentence of three months' complete rest is a great disappointment; but, if he'll feed up and rest, there's no reason why he shouldn't be as well as he ever was; I'm glad to say that his uncle has behaved quite well. After doing NOTHING all these years for him or Agnes or his own brother, he has at last shewn some decent feeling. If Jack has to be a partial invalid all his life, Lord Waring will give him whatever money's necessary to let him live anywhere he likes and take up any hobby he likes; if he wants to marry (I can't imagine that of Jack), there'll be a proper settlement.…"
If Jack, who was certainly not going to be a pauper, probably not even an invalid, had passed through London without coming to see Barbara, that meant that he did not want to see Barbara. Perhaps he had seen her.…
Eric telephoned to Berkeley Square and found his voice greeted with surprise and apprehensive pleasure.