with her
now and immediately lost to sight. Left alone she stood a moment looking
before her; then with a vague advance, held apparently by a quickly
growing sense of the implication of her act, reached a table where she
remained a little, deep afresh in thought--only the next thing to fall
into a chair close to it and there, with her elbows on it, yield to the
impulse of covering her flushed face with her hands.

BOOK THIRD

I

HUGH CRIMBLE waited again in the Bruton Street drawing-room--this time
at the afternoon hour; he restlessly shifted his place, looked at things
about him without seeing them; all he saw, all he outwardly studied,
was his own face and figure as he stopped an instant before a long glass
suspended between two windows. Just as he turned from that brief and
perhaps not wholly gratified inspection Lady Grace--that he had sent
up his name to whom was immediately apparent--presented herself at
the entrance from the other room. These young persons had hereupon no
instant exchange of words; their exchange was mute--they but paused
where they were; while the silence of each evidently tested the other
for full confidence. A measure of this comfort came first, it would have
appeared, to Hugh; though he then at once asked for confirmation of it.

"Am I right, Lady Grace, am I right?--to have _come_, I mean, after so
many days of not hearing, not knowing, and perhaps, all too stupidly,
not trying." And he went on as, still with her eyes on him, she didn't
speak; though, only, we should have guessed, from her stress of emotion.
"Even if I'm wrong, let me tell you, I don't care--simply because,
whatever new difficulty I may have brought about for you here a
fortnight ago, there's something that to-day adds to my doubt and my
fear too great a pang, and that has made me feel I can scarce bear the
suspense of them as they are."

The girl came nearer, and if her grave face expressed a pity it yet
declined a dread. "Of what suspense do you speak? Your still being
without the other opinion--?"

"Ah, that worries me, yes; and all the more, at this hour, as I say,
that--" He dropped it, however: "I'll tell you in a moment! My _real_
torment, all the while, has been not to know, from day to day, what
situation, what complication that last scene of ours with your father
here has let you in for; and yet at the same time--having no sign nor
sound from you!--to see the importance of not making anything p