Suddenly, as she tried to put some order in her thoughts, she heard Owen’s call at the door: “Mother!—-” a name he seldom gave her. There was a new note in his voice: the note of a joyous impatience. It made her turn hastily to the glass to see what face she was about to show him; but before she had had time to compose it he was in the room and she was caught in a school-boy hug.
“It’s all right! It’s all right! And it’s all your doing! I want to do the worst kind of penance–bell and candle and the rest. I’ve been through it with her, and now she hands me on to you, and you’re to call me any names you please.” He freed her with his happy laugh. “I’m to be stood in the corner till next week, and then I’m to go up to see her. And she says I owe it all to you!”
“To me?” It was the first phrase she found to clutch at as she tried to steady herself in the eddies of his joy.
“Yes: you were so patient, and so dear to her; and you saw at once what a damned ass I’d been!” She tried a smile, and it seemed to pass muster with him, for he sent it back in a broad beam. “That’s not so difficult to see? No, I admit it doesn’t take a microscope. But you were so wise and wonderful–you always are. I’ve been mad these last days, simply mad–you and she might well have washed your hands of me! And instead, it’s all right–all right!”
She drew back a little, trying to keep the smile on her lips and not let him get the least glimpse of what it hid. Now if ever, indeed, it behoved her to be wise and wonderful!
“I’m so glad, dear; so glad. If only you’ll always feel like that about me…” She stopped, hardly knowing what she said, and aghast at the idea that her own hands should have retied the knot she imagined to be broken. But she saw he had something more to say; something hard to get out, but absolutely necessary to express. He caught her hands, pulled her close, and, with his forehead drawn into its whimsical smiling wrinkles, “Look here,” he cried, “if Darrow wants to call me a damned ass too you’re not to stop him!”
It brought her back to a sharper sense of her central peril: of the secret to be kept from him at whatever cost to her racked nerves.
“Oh, you know, he doesn’t always wait for orders!” On the whole it sounded better than she’d feared.
“You mean he’s called me one already?” He accepted the fact with his gayest laugh. “Well, that saves a lot of trouble; now we can pass to the order of the day—-” he broke off and glanced at the clock–“which is, you know, dear, that she’s starting in about an hour; she and Adelaide must already be snatching a hasty sandwich. You’ll come down to bid them good-bye?”
“Yes–of course.”
There had, in fact, grown upon her while he spoke the urgency of seeing Sophy Viner again before she left. The thought was deeply distasteful: Anna shrank from encountering the girl till she had cleared a way through her own perplexities. But it was obvious that since they had separated, barely an hour earlier, the situation had taken a new shape. Sophy Viner had apparently reconsidered her decision to break amicably but definitely with Owen, and stood again in their path, a menace and a mystery; and confused impulses of resistance stirred in Anna’s mind. She felt Owen’s touch on her arm. “Are you coming?”
“Yes…yes…presently.”
“What’s the matter? You look so strange.”
“What do you mean by strange?”
“I don’t know: startled–surprised ” She read what her look must be by its sudden reflection in his face.
“Do I? No wonder! You’ve given us all an exciting morning.”
He held to his point. “You’re more excited now that there’s no cause for it. What on earth has happened since I saw you?”
He looked about the room, as if seeking the clue to her agitation, and in her dread of what he might guess she answered: “What has happened is simply that I’m rather tired. Will you ask Sophy to come up and see me here?”