"I have no doubt he would," she agreed. "The other cheek also, you know. But the real question is what the young woman would say in reply. You are too sensitive, Miss M."
"Perhaps I am." Oh that I could escape from this horrible net between us. "I know this, anyhow—that I lay awake till midnight because you had made a kind of promise to come in. Then I—I 'counted the pieces.'"
Her face whitened beneath the clear skin. "Oh, so we list——" she began, turning on me, then checked herself. "I tell you this," she said, her hand trembling, "I'm sick of it all. Those—those fools! Ph! I thought that you, being as you are—snippeting along out of the night—might understand. There's such a thing as friendship on false pretences, Miss M."
Was she, too, addressing, as she supposed, a confidant hardly more external to herself than that inward being whom we engage in such endless talk and argument? Her violence shocked me; still more her "fools." For the word was still next-door neighbour in my mind to the dreadful "Raca."
"'Understand,'" I said, "I do, if you would only let me. You just hide in your—in your own outside. You think because I am as I am that I'm only of that much account. It's you are the—foolish. Oh, don't let us quarrel. You just came. I never knew. Every hour, every minute...." Inarticulate my tongue might be, but my face told its tale. She must have heard many similar confessions, yet an almost childish incredulity lightened in hers.
"Keep there," she said; "keep there! I won't be a moment."
She hastened out of the room with the tea things, poising an instant like a bird on a branch as she pushed open the door with her foot. The slave left behind her listened to her footsteps dying away in a mingling of shame, sorrow, and of a happiness beyond words. I know now that it is not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the spirit within plays and has its being. Perhaps if I had realized this earlier, I shouldn't have fallen so easy a prey to Fanny Bowater. I waited—but that particular exchange of confidences was never to be completed. A key sounded in the latch. Fanny had but time to show herself with stooping, almost serpent-like head, in the doorway. "To-night!" she whispered. "And not a word, not a word!"