Constance winced, and pointedly avoided giving him leave. But for Alice’s sake she held her tongue. The wedding was to be hurried on, and Mrs. Hooper, able for once to buy new frocks with a clear conscience, and possessed of the money to pay for them, was made so happy by the bustle of the trousseau that she fell in love with her prospective son-in-law as the cause of it. Ewen Hooper meanwhile watched him with mildly shrewd eyes, deciding once more in his inner mind that mathematicians were an inferior race.
Not even to Nora—only to Mrs. Mulholland—did Constance ever lift the veil during these months. She was not long in succumbing to the queer charm of that lovable and shapeless person; and in the little drawing-room in St. Giles the girl of twenty would spend winter evenings, at the feet of her new friend, passing through various stages of confession; till one night Mrs. Mulholland lifted the small face, with her own large hand, and looked mockingly into the brown eyes:
‘Out with it, my dear!—You are in love with Douglas Falloden!’
Connie said nothing. Her little chin did not withdraw itself, nor did her eyes drop. But a film of tears rushed into them.
The truth was that in this dark wintry Oxford, and its neighbouring country, there lurked a magic for Connie which in the high midsummer pomps it had never possessed. Once or twice, in the distance of a winding street—on some football ground in the Parks—in the gallery of St. Mary’s on Sunday, Constance caught sight, herself unseen, of the tall figure and the curly head. Such glimpses made the fever of her young life. They meant far more to passion than her occasional meetings with Falloden at the Boar’s Hill cottage. And there were other points of contact. At the end of November, for instance, came the Merton Fellowship. Falloden won it, in a brilliant field; and Connie contrived to know all she wanted to know as to his papers and his rivals. After the announcement of his success, she trod on air. Finally she allowed herself to send him a little note of congratulation—very short and almost formal. He replied in the same tone.
Two days later, Falloden went over to Paris to see for himself the condition of the ‘Orpheus,’ and to arrange for its transport to England. He was away for nearly a week, and on his return called at once in Holywell, to report his visit. Nora was with Connie in the drawing-room when he was announced, and a peremptory look forbade her to slip away. She sat listening to the conversation.
Was this really Douglas Falloden—this grave, courteous man—without a trace of the ‘blood’ upon him? He seemed to her years older than he had been in May, and related, for the first time, to the practical everyday world. This absorption too in Otto Radowitz and his affairs—incredible! He and Connie first eagerly discussed certain domestic details of the cottage—the cook, the food, the draughts, the arrangements to be made for Otto’s open-air treatment which the doctors were now insisting on—with an anxious minuteness! Nora could hardly keep her face straight in the distance—they were so like a pair of crooning housewives. Then he began on his French visit, sitting sideways on his chair, his elbow on the back of it, and his hand thrust into his curly mass of hair—handsomer, thought Nora, than ever. And there was Connie listening spell-bound in a low chair opposite, her delicate pale profile distinct against the dark panelling of the room, her eyes fixed on him. Nora’s perplexed eyes travelled from one to the other.
As to the story of the ‘Orpheus’ and its inventor, both girls hung upon it. Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre, and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons of the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby revolutionised the minor arts of Europe. A small pinched fellow!—with a sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain teeming with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the Welt-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many. He had spent a fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no firm to take it up. Then Falloden’s astonishing letter and offer of funds, based on Radowitz’s report—itself the echo of a couple of letters from Paris—had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on.