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"Owen sees everything: I'm not afraid of that. But his future isn't settled. He's very young to marry too young, his grandmother is sure to think and the marriage he wants to make is not likely to convince her to the contrary." "You don't mean that it's like his first choice?" "Oh, no! But it's not what Madame de Chantelle would call a good match; it's not even what I call a wise one."
But there it was, inevitably, and whenever they looked at each other they saw it. In her dread of giving it a more tangible shape she tried to devise means of keeping the little girl with her, and, when the latter had been called away by the nurse, found an excuse for following Madame de Chantelle upstairs to the purple sitting-room.
Madame de Chantelle presently enquired what had become of Owen, and a moment later the window behind her opened, and her grandson, gun in hand, came in from the terrace.
Anna sat silent, listening to her small stiff steps as they minced down the hall and died out in the distance. Madame de Chantelle had broken her wooden embroidery frame, and Darrow, having offered to repair it, had drawn his chair up to a table that held a lamp. Anna watched him as he sat with bent head and knitted brows, trying to fit together the disjoined pieces.
He declined her offer of tea, but she lingered a moment to tell him that Owen had in fact kept his word, and that Madame de Chantelle had come back in the best of humours, and unsuspicious of the blow about to fall. "She has enjoyed her month at Ouchy, and it has given her a lot to talk about her symptoms, and the rival doctors, and the people at the hotel.
Since she had made no response to the allusion to Madame de Chantelle, Anna could but conjecture that she had had a passing disagreement with Owen; and if this were so, random interference might do more harm than good. "My dear child, if you really want to go at once I sha'n't, of course, urge you to stay. I suppose you have spoken to Owen?" "No. Not yet..."
He felt that their light would always move with him as the sunset moves before a ship at sea. The next day his sense of security was increased by a decisive incident. It became known to the expectant household that Madame de Chantelle had yielded to the tremendous impact of Miss Painter's determination and that Sophy Viner had been "sent for" to the purple satin sitting-room.
His encounter with Effie took place the next morning, on the lawn below the terrace, where he found her, in the early sunshine, knocking about golf balls with her brother. Almost at once, and with infinite relief, he saw that the resemblance of which Madame de Chantelle boasted was mainly external.
It did not seem possible that these quiet rooms, so full of the slowly-distilled accumulations of a fastidious taste, should have been the scene of tragic dissensions. The memory of them seemed to be shut out into the night with the closing and barring of its doors. At the tea-table in the oak-room they found Madame de Chantelle and Effie.
"Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine," she pursued, "that a young American girl ought to have a dossier a police-record, or whatever you call it: what those awful women in the streets have here. In our country it's enough to know that a young girl's pure and lovely: people don't immediately ask her to show her bank-account and her visiting-list."
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