Perhaps I exaggerate. Love, living or dying, even if it is not blind, cannot, I suppose, focus objects very precisely. It sees only itself or disillusionment. Whether or not, the duel was interrupted. In the full light of the window, Fanny turned softly at the opening of the door. Marvell was announcing another caller. At his name my heart leapt up like William Wordsworth's at the rainbow. It was Sir Walter Pollacke.
"This is your visitor, Poppet," Mrs Monnerie waggishly assured me, "you shall have half an hour's tête-à-tête."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
So it was with a deep sigh—half of regret at being called away, and all of joy at the thought of seeing my old friend again—that I followed Marvell's coat-tails over the threshold. With a silly, animal-like affection I brushed purposely against Fanny's skirts as I passed her by; and even smirked in a kind of secret triumph at Percy Maudlen, who happened to be idling on the staircase as I hastened from room to room.
The door of the library closed gently behind me, as if with a breath of peace. I paused—looked across. Sir Walter was standing at the further end of its high, daylit, solemn spaciousness. He was deep in contemplation of a white marble bust that graced the lofty chimney-piece—so rapt, indeed, that until I had walked up into the full stream of sunshine from a nearer window and had announced my approach with a cough, he did not notice my entrance. Then he flicked round with an exclamation of welcome.
"My dear, dear young lady," he cried, beaming down on me from between his peaked collar-tips, over his little black bow, the gold rim of his large eye-glasses pressed to his lip, "a far—far more refreshing sight! Would you believe it, it was the pleasing little hobby of that oiled and curled monstrosity up there—Heliogabalus—to smother his guests in roses—literally, smother them? Now," and he looked at me quizzically as if through a microscope, "the one question is how have you survived what I imagine must have been a similar ordeal? Not quite at the last gasp, I hope? Comparatively happy? It's all we can hope for, my dear, in this world."
I nodded, hungrily viewing him, meeting as best I could the bright blue eyes, and realizing all in a moment the dark inward of my mind.
Those other eyes began thinking as well as looking. "Well, well, that's right. And now we must have a little quiet talk before his Eminence reappears. So our old friend Mrs Bowater has gone husband-hunting? Gallant soul: she came to see me."