“We shall be late, you know,” Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his watch.
“Go ahead,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “I want to get something–”
Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he feared.
The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till it dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric railway, and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from the imminent risk of any allusion to the “Letters.” Flamel suffered his discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else’s suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa’s tea-table without a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa’s presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light thrown on the speaker’s words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the block. Glennard, under his wife’s composure, detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may conceivably work one’s way through a labyrinth; but Alexa’s candor was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no landmarks to travel by.
Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he saw the second volume of the “Letters” lying open on his wife’s table. He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one of the last . . . he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem like that . . .?
Alexa’s voice came suddenly out of the dusk. “May Touchett was right–it IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn’t read it!”
Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are punctuated by a cigarette, “It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another generation the book will be a classic.”
“Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic. It’s horrible, it’s degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one might have known.” She added, in a lower tone, “Stephen did know her–”
“Did he?” came from Flamel.
“He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him feel dreadfully . . . he wouldn’t read it . . . he didn’t want me to read it. I didn’t understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it must seem to him. It’s so much worse to surprise a friend’s secrets than a stranger’s.”
“Oh, Glennard’s such a sensitive chap,” Flamel said, easily; and Alexa almost rebukingly rejoined, “If you’d known her I’m sure you’d feel as he does. . . .”
Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of Margaret Aubyn’s, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the publication of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel’s astuteness it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the possibility once suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it by discreet research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel’s presence? If the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and above all, it would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against the perpetual criticism of his wife’s belief in him. . . .