The next moment he follows her into the room, lights the gas, returns to the door, closes it, and then comes back towards the rug where she is standing.
By this time his command is his own. His face is as calm as a mask. His large eyes, somewhat bloodshot now from hours of smoking and a sleepless night, rest upon her with cold enquiry.
She has seen them once, met them once, fixed, liquid, with passionate longing upon hers; desperately she seeks in them now for one gleam of the same light, but there is none. They and his face are cloaked in a cold reserve. Sick, and with her heart beating to suffocation, she says, as he waits for her to explain her presence:
"We are—going away."
Stephen's heart seems to contract at the words he had so often dreaded to hear, heard at last.
His thoughts take a greyer hopelessness.
"Oh, really!" he says merely, the shock he feels only slightly intensifying his habitual drawl. "Not immediately, I hope?"
Nothing to the nervous, excited, over-strained girl before him could be more galling, more humiliating, more crushing than the cold, conventional politeness of his tones and words.
This frightful fence of Society manner that he will put between them—a slight, delicate defence, is as effectual as if he caused a precipice by magic to yawn between them.
"No—not—not—quite immediately, but soon," she falters. "And it seems as if I could not exist if—I—never see you."