"Never mind him; he's nobody! Only one more.... Yes, dearest love, I'm really going.... Good-bye! good-bye! God bless you!"
And then how she stood there with the memory of his lips dying on hers, alone by the gate, in the wild wind, and heard the sharp regular trot of the horse lessen on the hard road and die away, and then the running of a train she thought was his, and how he would surely miss it, and have to come back. And it would be nice just to see him again! But he was gone, for all that, and he was a dear good boy. And she recollected going to her bedroom to do up her hair, which had all come down, and hiding her face on her pillow in a big burst of tears.
Her mind harked back on all this as he himself, the same but changed, stood there in the moonlight striving to recollect it all, and mysteriously failing. But at least, he did fail, and that was something. But oh, what a wrench it gave to life, thought, reason, to all her heart and being, to have that unconscious chit cut in with "only mamma for the girl!" What and whence was this little malaprop? Her overwrought mind shut away this question—almost in the asking it—with "Dearer to me, at least, than anything else in this world, unless——" and then shut away the rest of the answer.
But she was glad to get at Sally, and feel her there, though she
could not speak freely to her—nor, indeed, speak at all. And as soon as the tension died down, she went back as to a source of peace to the failure of his powers of memory, obvious, complete. All her hopes lay in that. Where would they be if the whole past were suddenly sprung on him? He might be ready to bury bygones, but——
She woke next day fairly at ease in her mind, but feeling as one does after any near-run escape. And then it was she said to herself that she was a good actress. But the part was hard to act.
The relations between Fenwick and the Nightingales, mother and daughter, seem to us to have been acquiring cohesion at the time of the foregoing interview. It is rather difficult to say why. But it serves to pave the way to the state of things that Sally accepted as the "spooneyness" of Fenwick, and her mother's observation of his "going on," without the dimmest idea of the underlying motives of the drama. Another three months, bringing us on to these discriminations of Sally's, may also have brought about appearances that justified them.