The thing I had been most sensible of in that talk with George Gravener was the way Saltram's name kept out of it. It seemed to me at the time that we were quite pointedly silent about him; yet afterwards I inclined to think that there had been on my companion's part no conscious avoidance. Later on I was sure of this, and for the best of reasons—the reason, namely, of my perceiving more completely that, for evil as well as for good, he left Gravener's imagination utterly cold. Gravener was not afraid of him; he was too much disgusted with him. No more was I, doubtless, and for very much the same reason. I treated my friend's story as an absolute confidence; but when before Christmas, by Mrs. Saltram, I was informed of Lady Coxon's death without having had news of Miss Anvoy's return, I found myself taking for granted that we should hear no more of these nuptials, in which I now recognised an element incongruous from the first. I began to ask myself how people who suited each other so little could please each other so much. The charm was some material charm, some affinity exquisite doubtless, but superficial; some surrender to youth and beauty and passion, to force and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy contacts. They might dote on each other's persons, but how could they know each other's souls? How could they have the same prejudices, how could they have the same horizon? Such questions, I confess, seemed quenched but not answered when, one day in February, going out to Wimbledon, I found my young lady in the house. A passion that had brought her back across the wintry ocean was as much of a passion as was necessary. No impulse equally strong indeed had drawn George Gravener to America; a circumstance on which, however, I reflected only long enough to remind myself that it was none of my business. Ruth Anvoy was distinctly different, and I felt that the difference was not simply that of her being in mourning. Mrs. Mulville told me soon enough what it was: it was the difference between a handsome girl with large expectations and a handsome girl with only four hundred a year. This explanation indeed didn't wholly content me, not even when I learned that her mourning had a double cause—learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way altogether, buried under the ruins of his fortune and leaving next to nothing, had died a few weeks before.
“So she has come out to marry George Gravener?” I demanded. “Wouldn't it have been prettier of him to have saved her the trouble?”
“Hasn't the House just met?” said Adelaide. Then she added: “I gather that her having come is exactly a sign that the marriage is a little shaky. If it were certain, so self-respecting a girl as Ruth would have waited for him over there.”
I noted that they were already Ruth and Adelaide, but what I said was: “Do you mean that she has returned to make it a certainty?”
“No, I mean that I imagine she has come out for some reason independent of it.” Adelaide could only imagine as yet, and there was more, as we found, to be revealed. Mrs. Mulville, on hearing of her arrival, had brought the young lady out, in the green landau, for the Sunday. The Coxons were in possession of the house in the Regent's Park, and Miss Anvoy was in dreary lodgings. George Gravener was with her when Adelaide called, but he had assented graciously enough to the little visit at Wimbledon. The carriage, with Mr. Saltram in it but not mentioned, had been sent off on some errand from which it was to return and pick the ladies up. Gravener left them together, and at the end of an hour, on the Saturday afternoon, the party of three drove out to Wimbledon. This was the girl's second glimpse of our great man, and I was interested in asking Mrs. Mulville if the impression made by the first appeared to have been confirmed. On her replying, after consideration, that of course with time and opportunity it couldn't fail to be, but that as yet she was disappointed, I was sufficiently struck with her use of this last word to question her further.
“Do you mean that you're disappointed because you judge that Miss Anvoy is?”
“Yes; I hoped for a greater effect last evening. We had two or three people, but he scarcely opened his mouth.”
“He'll be all the better this evening,” I added after a moment. “What particular importance do you attach to the idea of her being impressed?”
Adelaide turned her clear, pale eyes on me as if she were amazed at my levity. “Why, the importance of her being as happy as we are!”
I'm afraid that at this my levity increased. “Oh, that's a happiness almost too great to wish a person!” I saw she had not yet in her mind what I had in mine, and at any rate the visitor's actual bliss was limited to a walk in the garden with Kent Mulville. Later in the afternoon I also took one, and I saw nothing of Miss Anvoy till dinner, at which we were without the company of Saltram, who had caused it to be reported that he was out of sorts and lying down. This made us, most of us—for there were other friends present—convey to each other in silence some of the unutterable things which in those years our eyes had inevitably acquired the art of expressing. If an American inquirer had not been there we would have expressed them otherwise, and Adelaide would have pretended not to hear. I had seen her, before the very fact, abstract herself nobly; and I knew that more than once, to keep it from the servants, managing, dissimulating cleverly, she had helped her husband to carry him bodily to his room. Just recently he had been so wise and so deep and so high that I had begun to be nervous—to wonder if by chance there were something behind it, if he were kept straight, for instance, by the knowledge that the hated Pudneys would have more to tell us if they chose. He was lying low, but unfortunately it was common knowledge with us that the biggest splashes took place in the quietest pools. We should have had a merry life indeed if all the splashes had sprinkled us as refreshingly as the waters we were even then to feel about our ears. Kent Mulville had been up to his room, but had come back with a facial inscrutability that I had seen him achieve in equal measure only on the evening I waited in the lecture-room with Miss Anvoy. I said to myself that our friend had gone out, but I was glad that the presence of a comparative stranger deprived us of the dreary duty of suggesting to each other, in respect of his errand, edifying possibilities in which we didn't ourselves believe. At ten o'clock he came into the drawing-room with his waistcoat much awry but his eyes sending out great signals. It was precisely with his entrance that I ceased to be vividly conscious of him. I saw that the crystal, as I had called it, had begun to swing, and I had need of my immediate attention for Miss Anvoy.