“I daresay she is somebody’s mother-in-law,” remarked Mrs. Elles, with pathos.
“And eyes like gimlets! She had a good look at me!”
“And now she is most probably pumping them about you, and me, and who and what we are!”
“Probably,” he replied rather grimly, and sat down in front of his drawing, and began to work at it with all the signs of intense concentration.
She stayed where she was, in the window seat, and watched him, with an ardent, timidly devouring gaze. This time, he was too much absorbed to look up, so it was quite safe.
She found herself wondering how a man could live in such an atmosphere of passionate regard, and not know it. It seemed to her that the cloud, as it were, of devotion and admiration with which she enwrapped him, was so intensely actual—a positive physical fact,—it seemed to her that she could see the halo with which she crowned him.
For literally half-an-hour she heard nothing but the intermittent plip-plop of the brush in the glass of water, fast growing muddy coloured. He seemed to her to dash the brush into it with more energy—nay virulence—than usual.
She presently observed aloud, with the sweet impertinence permitted by intimacy: “How you are dashing it in! I call that the splash and carry one of art, but I suppose it will all come out right in the end.”
“Or all wrong,” he said—and his voice was so changed that she looked up in surprise. “The chances are that I shall never finish it. I am thinking of leaving this place to-morrow!”
“What?” she screamed, rather than said; and her voice from excess of emotion was shrill and strident enough to apprise even one so absorbed as Rivers that his intelligence was of no ordinary degree of importance to his listener.