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He had such an air of proposing a bargain, of making the wait a condition, that she had to look it well in the face. The result of her doing so, however, was apparently a strong sense that she could give him no pledge. She sank suddenly into the chair she had already occupied. “Go up to him!” she simply repeated. He obeyed, with an abrupt turn, mounting briskly several steps, but pausing midway and looking back at her. He descended a few steps again and seemed, with too much on his mind, on the point of breaking out. She had sat a minute in such thought that at the sound of his return she sprang up with a protest. This checked him afresh, and he remained where he had paused, exchanging with her a look to which neither was inspired, oddly enough, to contribute a word. It struck him, without words, as enough, and he now took his upward course at such a pace that he presently disappeared.
She listened awhile to his retreating tread; then her own, on the old flags of the hall, became rapid, though directed to no visible end. It conveyed her, in the great space, from point to point, but she now for the first time moved there without attention and without joy, her course determined by a series of inward throbs as might have been the suppressed beats of a speech. A real observer, had such a monster been present, would have followed this tacit evolution from sign to sign. “Why didn’t he tell me all?—But it was none of my business!—What does he mean to do?—What should he do but what he has done?—And what can he do, when he’s so deeply committed, when he’s practically engaged, when he’s just the same as married—and buried?—The thing for me to ‘do’ is just to pull up short and bundle out: to remove from the scene they encumber the numerous fragments—well, of what?”
Her thought was plainly arrested by the sight of Cora Prodmore, who, returning from the garden, reappeared first in the court and then in the open doorway. Mrs. Gracedew’s was a thought, however, that, even when desperate, was never quite vanquished, and it found a presentable public solution in the pieces of the vase smashed by Chivers and just then, on the table where he had laid them, catching her eye. “Of my old Chelsea pot!” Her gay, sad headshake as she took one of them up pronounced for Cora’s benefit its funeral oration. She laid the morsel thoughtfully down, while her visitor seemed with simple dismay to read the story.
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