"Most ripping," said Fanny, meeting his long, slow, sneaking glance with a slight and seemingly involuntary lift of her narrow shoulder. A long look I could not share passed between them; I might have been a toy on the floor.
"But you don't look positively in the pink," he turned to me. "Now, does she? Late hours, eh? You look crumpled, doesn't she? Cherry, too: we must have in another Vet." The laugh died on his long lips. His eyes roved stealthily from point to point of the basking afternoon room, then once more sluggishly refastened on Fanny. I sat motionless, watching his every turn and twist, and repeating rapidly to myself, "Go away, my friend; go away, go away." Some nerve in him must have taken the message at last, or he found Fanny's silence uneasy. He squinnied a glinting, curious look at me, and as jauntily as self-consciousness permitted, took his departure.
The door shut. His presence fainted out into a phantasm, and that into nothing at all. And for sole evidence of him basked on my table, beneath a thread of sunlight, his blue-ribboned box.
"Isn't he a ninny?" sighed Fanny. "And yet, my dear: there—but for the grace of God—goes Mr Fanny Bowater."
Her anger had evaporated. There stood my familiar Fanny again, slim as a mast, her light eyes coldly shining, her bearing, even the set of her foot showing already a faint gilding of Mrs Monnerie. She laughed—looking straight across at me, as if with a challenge.
"Yes, my dear, it's quite true. I'm not a bit cross now. Milk and Honey. So you see even a fool may be a lightning conductor. I forgive," she pouted a kiss from the tips of her fingers, "I forget."
And then she was gone too, and I alone. What an easy, consoling thing—not to care. But though Fanny might forgive, she must have found it unamusing to forget. The next evening's post brought me an exquisitely written little fable, signed "F. B.," and entitled Asteroida and the Yellow Dwarf. I couldn't enjoy it very much; though no doubt it must have been exceedingly entertaining when read aloud.
Still Fanny did not care. While I myself was like those railway lines under the green bank I had seen on my journey to Lyme Regis. A day's neglect, a night's dews, and I was stained thick with rust. A dull and heedless wretchedness took possession of me. The one thought that kept recurring in every instant of solitude, and most sharply in those instants which pounced on me in the midst of strangers, was, how to escape.
I put away the envelope and its contents into my box again. And late that night, when I was secure from interruption, I wrote to Wanderslore. Nibbling a pen is no novelty to me, but never in all my life have I spent so blank and hideous an hour merely in the effort to say No to one simple question so that it should sound almost as pleasant as Yes, and far more unselfish. "Throw the stone," indeed; when my only desire was to heal the wound it might make.