Lady Tintagel was alone. She stood at the far end of the drawing-room.
When he entered she was leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down into the fire.
She turned, still gripping the marble edge with her left hand.
She wore a gown of trailing black velvet and stood on a white Angora rug.
Miles of rose carpet lay between him and the fireplace.
He seemed to be walking uphill, as he came toward her.
When he reached the rug at last, he and she seemed to be standing together on the summit of a delectable mountain. His mind still ran on his unsuitable attire, but he forgot the sentence he had prepared.
60“I couldn’t,” was his lame apology.
She looked at him, and smiled. “You—wouldn’t,” she said.
There was such complete understanding in the grave regard of her kind eyes, in the low tones of her voice, so sweet and full of music.
It was all strangely intimate. As he stood beside her, lines he had heard years before flashed into his mind.
“Two men looked out through prison bars;
One saw mud; the other, stars.”
Hitherto he had seen mud—always mud. In her presence he realised the possibility of seeing stars—undreamed of stars.
And his prison bars themselves seemed vanishing.
Something captive in him broke its chains and leapt out into liberty.
And still she spoke no word; but her eyes dwelt on him with that all-enveloping, comprehending look of tenderness.
An unspoken sentence seemed to hang 61suspended. The silence was tense with it, as when a great orchestra, ready to sound the opening strain of a mighty symphony, waits, with eye, hand, and ear alert, for the first beat of the lifted baton.
But, on the instant, came an anti-climax.
“Dinner is served, my lady,” announced a deferential voice.
She laughed. “I suppose one must eat,” she said; and his common sense wondered why she said it, and why the same thought, unspoken, had been in his own mind.
She laid her hand within his arm, and they moved slowly down the room together. Walking so with her, he noted that she was slightly taller than he. She leaned on him. He felt vividly alive. Where was his shell—his shell of morbid reserve, in which he had hidden himself since his babyhood?
He tried to ask her how it came about that she had been expecting him; but something restrained the question.
He wanted to tell her all about himself, 62right from the beginning; all he had thought, and felt, and suffered; his shrinking from intimacy with his fellow-men; his loneliness; his shameful habit—he knew, now, that it was shameful—of looking in, unseen, at other people’s windows, his half-unconscious belief that some day he would look in, out of the darkness, and see a room which his spirit would acclaim as home; and how, to-day—at last—But he could not tell her that! Yes, he could! He could tell her anything. She would understand. And, when his confession was over, he would kneel before her—as a tired little boy might kneel at his mother’s knees at bedtime—and say his prayers. Then she would lay her hands upon his head, and Divine forgiveness and benediction would be his.
They were crossing the hall. The butler stood at the dining-room door.
“After dinner,” she said, “you must tell me all.”