A scornful snort interrupted his flow of facile suggestion:
“How old is she? Twenty? And a very pretty girl, so far as I could see. And you’re disgustingly well-known. Don’t you think it would cause some little comment, if you and she went on your travels together?... After all, I think you’d better tell me who she is.”
Eric shook his head, and a silence followed. Then he shrugged his shoulders.
“Connie Maitland’s niece, a daughter of the judge,” he said at length.
“My dear friend, there are limits to human faith even in your moral reputation!” cried the doctor. “No, something can be done in this country, but you must find an excuse for getting her away from her friends for a considerable time.”
“I was wondering whether I’d get my mother to ask her down to Lashmar.”
“It wouldn’t be fair on Lady Lane; she’s of the old school. Besides, your sister wouldn’t give her a fair chance: a woman’s severest judges are her own sex. And you’ve brothers; the girl wouldn’t face them. And you always tell me it’s a dead-and-alive little hamlet where the servants would gossip and every one would gape and whisper. In twenty-four hours the responsibility would be laid at your door, and people would wonder why you didn’t marry her.”
“I’m beginning to wonder that myself.”
Gaisford prepared to speak and then closed his lips, waiting for more to come, as Eric covered his eyes with his hand and tapped the fender with one restless heel. By shutting out the light he could forget the doctor’s presence and imagine the room as he had seen it that morning, with a slim black figure shrinking into one corner of a big chair. At this moment—he listened to the calm deliberate ticking of the clock behind his head—at this moment she was probably lying on her bed, powerless even to undress, smothering her sobs in a pillow; or perhaps she was on her knees, praying wildly, desperately until she fell asleep from exhaustion; when she awoke, a sense of disaster would cloud and terrify her mind until it defined itself and she wept to find herself still alive. The anguished incoherence of her prayers seemed to rise and swell like wind in the rigging of a ship; he could see her very clearly, hear her very plainly....
The creak of the doctor’s chair recalled him to the present, and Eric looked cautiously round the room as though uncertain who was there. From the moment when Ivy came and sobbed in his arms, he had forgotten everything but an urgent need to help her; one accusing pile of letters lay unopened on his writing-table, another was waiting unsigned; he had done no work; and for the first time in nearly three years he had hardly thought of Barbara.