She stayed a moment, her hand on the bell. ‘Was it my brother who actually put that horrible idea into your mind?—about Sabathier?’
‘Oh no, not really put it into my head,’ said Lawford hollowly. ‘He only found it there; lit it up.’
She laid her hand lightly on his arm. ‘Whether he did or not,’ she said with an earnestness that was almost an entreaty, ‘of course, you must agree that we every one of us have some such experience—that kind of visitor, once at least, in a lifetime.’ ‘Ah, but,’ began Lawford, turning forlornly away, ‘you didn’t see, you can’t have realized—the change.’
She pulled the bell almost as if in some inward triumph. ‘But don’t you think,’ she suggested, ‘that that, like the other, might be, as it were, partly imagination too? If now you thought back....’
But a little old woman had opened the door, and the sentence, for the moment, was left unfinished.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There was no one in the room, and no light, when they entered. For a moment Grisel stood by the open window, looking out. Then she turned impulsively. ‘My brother, of course, will ask you too,’ she said; ‘we had made up our minds to do so if you came again; but I want you to promise me now that you won’t dream of going back to-night. That surely would be tempting—well, not Providence. I couldn’t rest if I thought you might be alone; like that again.’ Her voice died away into the calling of the waters. A light moved across the dingy old rows of books and as his sister turned to go out Herbert appeared in the doorway, carrying a green-shaded lamp, with an old leather quarto under his arm.
‘Ah, here you are,’ he said. ‘I guessed you had probably met.’ He drew up, burdened, before his visitor. But his clear black glance, instead of wandering off at his first greeting, had intensified. And it was almost with an air of absorption that he turned away. He dumped his book on to a chair and it turned over with scattered leaves on to the floor. He put the lamp down and stooped after it, so that his next words came up muffled, and as if the remark had been forced out of him. ‘You don’t feel worse, I hope?’ He got up and faced his visitor for the answer. And for the moment Lawford stood considering his symptoms.
‘No,’ he said almost gaily; ‘I feel enormously better.’ But Herbert’s long, oval, questioning eyes beneath the sleek black hair were still fixed on his face. ‘I am afraid, my dear fellow,’ he said, with something more than his usual curiously indifferent courtesy, ‘the struggle has frightfully pulled you to pieces.’
‘The question is,’ answered Lawford, with a kind of tired yet whimsical melancholy in his voice, ‘though I am not sure that the answer very much matters—what’s going to put me together again? It’s the old story of Humpty Dumpty, Herbert. Besides, one thing you said has stuck out in a quite curious way in my memory. I wonder if you will remember?’