An instant later the dog had started up and scoured from the room as if life and death depended on his presence elsewhere. Adrian heard something his sister did not, and exclaimed "What's that?"
"Nothing," said Irene. "Only someone at the front-door. Ply's always like that."
"I didn't mean Ply. Listen! Be quiet." The room they were in was remote from the front-door of the house, and the voice they heard was no more than a musical modulation of silence. It had a power in it, for all that, to rouse the blind man to excitement. He had to put a restraint on himself to say quietly:—"Suppose you go and see! Do you mind?" Irene left the room.
Anyone who had seen Adrian then for the first time, and watched him standing motionless with his hands on a chairback and the eyes that saw nothing gazing straight in front of him, but not towards the door, would have wondered to see a man of his type apparently so interested in his own image, repeated by the mirror before him as often as eyesight could trace its give-and-take with the one that faced it on the wall behind him. He was the wrong man for a Narcissus. The strength of his framework was wrong throughout. Narcissus had no bone-distances, as artists say, and his hair was in crisp curls, good for the sculptor. No one ever needed to get a pair of scissors to snip it. But though anyone might have marvelled at Adrian Torrens's seeming Narcissus-like intentness on his own manifold image, he could never have surmised that cruel blindness was its apology. He could never have guessed, from anything in their seeming, that the long perspective of gazing orbs, vanishing into nothingness, were not more sightless than their originals.
He only listened for a moment. For, distant as she was, Irene's cry of surprise on meeting some new-comer was decisive as to that new-comer's identity. It could be no one but Gwen. Irene's welcome settled that.
The blind man was feeling his way to the door when Gwen opened it. Then she was in his arms, and what cared he for anything else in the heavens above or the earth beneath? His exultation had to die down, like the resonant chords in the music he had played an hour since, before he could come to the level of speech. Then he said prosaically:—"This is very irregular! How about the solemn compact? How are we going to look our mamma in the face?"
"Did it yesterday evening!" said Gwen. "We had an explosion.... Well, I won't say that—suppose we call it a warm discussion, leading to a more reasonable attitude on the part of ... of the people who were in the wrong. The other people, that is to say!"
"Precisely. They always are. I vote we sit on the sofa, and you take your bonnet off. I know it's on by the ribbons under your chin—not otherwise."
"What a clever man he is—drawing inferences! However, bonnets have got very much out of sight, I admit. Hands off, please!... There!—now I can give particulars."
Irene, who—considerately, perhaps—had not followed closely, here came in, saying:—"Stop a minute! I haven't heard anything yet.... There!—now go on."