“I think I ought to tell you that I’ve seen something of Gaymer the last few days,” Eric told her, when he came to say good-bye. “He’s very anxious to see you. He didn’t know you were ill, he didn’t suspect any reason why you should be. I don’t quite know what he told you at Croxton, but he assures me that he regards himself as being still engaged to you. I reminded him that you’d already given him his answer, but he persisted that there are new facts. If you don’t want to see him—”
“I don’t!,” Ivy cried in apprehension. “You must keep him away.”
It was an appeal for protection, but Eric could not protect her against an attack which had not been launched. It wrung his heart to see Ivy helpless and pleading, but he was so tired that he would gladly have dropped into a trance where responsibility and striving were unknown, where he could rest, where no one could blame him or attack him or appeal to him....
“He won’t take it from me,” he pointed out—and was hurt to see that Ivy was disappointed in him for the first time. He wondered how Gaymer would have spoken and acted, if the positions had been reversed....
“I can’t see him without you!”
“My child, then don’t see him at all. When you feel well enough, send him a line and tell him that nothing he could ever say or do would make any difference.”
When Eric reached Lashmar Mill-House, he found that an inaccurate but serviceable legend had already been woven round Ivy’s illness. For days and nights, he gathered, he had been nursing her single-handed, which accounted for a natural look of fatigue on his face; for the operation his flat had been turned upside down, and he had now been driven out to make way for a second nurse. It was an explanation which barred all speculation about his own health and absolved him from confessing that he was himself in Gaisford’s hands.
“Will you be able to have Ivy down here, when she’s fit to move?,” he asked.
“Of course,” Lady Lane answered warmly.
“She’ll be convalescent in a fortnight or three weeks. I was thinking of staying here in the meantime... The country’s looking very beautiful. I think I shall go for a stroll before dinner.”