She had known all along that this must come and she had made up her mind how she would behave when it came—but not so suddenly, good God! Her resolution deserted her and her voice betrayed her.
The painter deliberately laid down his brush, and came to where she was sitting in the window-seat, and taking her two unresisting hands, led her a few paces into the room.
“There are people in the garden,” he said quietly. He screwed up his eyes, and looked at her exactly as if she were a “subject,”—and a difficult one, as she thought afterwards.
“Now, please listen to me,” he went on, with a little gentle pressure of the hands pushing her into a seat. “I have been thinking——”
“Oh, dear!” she murmured, like a spoilt child. She was so acutely conscious that any reflection on his part was likely to mean a conclusion inimical to her peace. The moment he thought about it, he would be sure to see how wrong and impossible the whole situation was.
“I am a careless fellow,” Rivers proceeded to say, “and my head is generally full of my own work, to the exclusion of everything else.... I can’t say I ever thought about it, but I have heard something to-day—Mr. Popham made an absurd suggestion to me—which shows me that I am very stupidly compromising you by my presence here.”
Mrs. Elles interrupted him with vehemence, stung by his generosity in putting it so.
“Indeed no, it is I who am the interloper! It is I who ought to go—and I will!” She drew herself up proudly. “You to go! Why, your picture isn’t anything like finished.”
“The picture is a minor matter, compared with—”
“It is quite the most important thing in the world,” she rejoined, with a little touch of irony, bitterly aware that to him it was so, indeed. Then her spirit oozed away, and she said, weakly, “No, no, it is for me to go, of course—but, oh, we were so happy! Why must you make me——”