“How can it be preposterous, since it’s true? Or insulting, since I don’t know, any more than you, the meaning of what I’ve been seeing? If you’ll be patient with me I’ll try to put it quietly. What I mean is that Sophy has completely changed since she met Darrow here, and that, having noticed the change, I’m hardly to blame for having tried to find out its cause.”
Anna made an effort to answer him with the same composure. “You’re to blame, at any rate, for so recklessly assuming that you have found it out. You seem to forget that, till they met here, Sophy and Mr. Darrow hardly knew each other.”
“If so, it’s all the stranger that they’ve been so often closeted together!”
“Owen, Owen–” the girl sighed out.
He turned his haggard face to her. “Can I help it, if I’ve seen and known what I wasn’t meant to? For God’s sake give me a reason–any reason I can decently make out with! Is it my fault if, the day after you arrived, when I came back late through the garden, the curtains of the study hadn’t been drawn, and I saw you there alone with Darrow?”
Anna laughed impatiently. “Really, Owen, if you make it a grievance that two people who are staying in the same house should be seen talking together—-!”
“They were not talking. That’s the point—-”
“Not talking? How do you know? You could hardly hear them from the garden!”
“No; but I could see. HE was sitting at my desk, with his face in his hands. SHE was standing in the window, looking away from him…”
He waited, as if for Sophy Viner’s answer; but still she neither stirred nor spoke.
“That was the first time,” he went on; “and the second was the next morning in the park. It was natural enough, their meeting there. Sophy had gone out with Effie, and Effie ran back to look for me. She told me she’d left Sophy and Darrow in the path that leads to the river, and presently we saw them ahead of us. They didn’t see us at first, because they were standing looking at each other; and this time they were not speaking either. We came up close before they heard us, and all that time they never spoke, or stopped looking at each other. After that I began to wonder; and so I watched them.”
“Oh, Owen!” “Oh, I only had to wait. Yesterday, when I motored you and the doctor back from the lodge, I saw Sophy coming out of the spring-house. I supposed she’d taken shelter from the rain, and when you got out of the motor I strolled back down the avenue to meet her. But she’d disappeared–she must have taken a short cut and come into the house by the side door. I don’t know why I went on to the spring-house; I suppose it was what you’d call spying. I went up the steps and found the room empty; but two chairs had been moved out from the wall and were standing near the table; and one of the Chinese screens that lie on it had dropped to the floor.”
Anna sounded a faint note of irony. “Really? Sophy’d gone there for shelter, and she dropped a screen and moved a chair?”
“I said two chairs—-”
“Two? What damning evidence–of I don’t know what!”
“Simply of the fact that Darrow’d been there with her. As I looked out of the window I saw him close by, walking away. He must have turned the corner of the spring-house just as I got to the door.”
There was another silence, during which Anna paused, not only to collect her own words but to wait for Sophy Viner’s; then, as the girl made no sign, she turned to her.
“I’ve absolutely nothing to say to all this; but perhaps you’d like me to wait and hear your answer?”
Sophy raised her head with a quick flash of colour. “I’ve no answer either–except that Owen must be mad.”
In the interval since she had last spoken she seemed to have regained her self-control, and her voice rang clear, with a cold edge of anger.