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VII

A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”

The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told me you were out and I came upstairs.”

The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.

“Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he obstructed her vision of the books.

“I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”

“I can’t think what you see in those people,” he said with a shrug; adding, uncontrollably–“I suppose Flamel was there?”

“No; he left on the yacht this morning.”

An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.

“Ah, you’ve brought them! I’m so glad,” she exclaimed.

He answered over his shoulder, “For a woman who never reads you make the most astounding exceptions!”

Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had been hot in town or that something had bothered him.

“Do you mean it’s not nice to want to read the book?” she asked. “It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I’m not responsible for that, am I?” She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still smiling, “I do read sometimes, you know; and I’m very fond of Margaret Aubyn’s books. I was reading ‘Pomegranate Seed’ when we first met. Don’t you remember? It was then you told me all about her.”

Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife. “All about her?” he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand, and moved by the lover’s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring impressively in Miss Trent’s imagination he had gone on from one anecdote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of greatness.

The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct of self-preservation–sometimes the most perilous that man can exercise–made him awkwardly declare–“Oh, I used to see her at people’s houses, that was all;” and her silence as usual leaving room for a multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, “I simply can’t see what you can find to interest you in such a book.”

She seemed to consider this intently. “You’ve read it, then?”

“I glanced at it–I never read such things.”

“Is it true that she didn’t wish the letters to be published?”

Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge, and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step ahead.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed his hand through her arm. “I didn’t have tea at the Dreshams, you know; won’t you give me some now?” he suggested.

That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his papers he said to his wife: “You’re not going to sit indoors on such a night as this? I’ll join you presently outside.”