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"Don't bother about Mrs. Grundy. I'm so tired and so bored. Anybody may visit an invalid. Think this is a nursing home, and you're my daily visitor. Falloden's miles away on a drag-hunt. Ah, that's right!" he cried delightedly, as he saw that she had seated herself. "Now you shall have some tea!" She let him provide her, watching him the while with slightly frowning brows.
The lookout in the quadrangle turned to walk quietly towards the porter's lodge. The Senior Tutor a spare tall man with a Jove-like brow emerged from the library, and stood on the steps surveying the broken glass. "All run to cover, of course!" was his reflection, half scornful, half disgusted. "But I am certain I heard Falloden's voice. What a puppy stage it is!
Then her thoughts flew onward to the ball of the evening, for it was the night of the Marmion ball. No more escape! If she went and nothing should prevent her from going it would be Falloden's evening, Falloden's chance. She had been perfectly conscious of evading and thwarting him during the previous week. There had been some girlish mischief, but more excitement in it.
Hooper and Alice, Constance, still standing by the piano, and apparently chatting with Herbert Pryce, was really aware of Falloden's every movement. His manner to her aunt was brusque and careless; and he forgot, apparently, to say good night either to Alice or Nora. Nobody in the room, as she well knew, except herself, found any pleasure in his society.
She hesitated smiled. And again the smile or was it the May sun and wind? gave her that heightening, that touch of brilliance that a face so delicate must often miss. Falloden's fastidious sense approved her wholly: the white dress; the hat that framed her brow; the slender gold chains which rose and fell on her gently rounded breast; her height and grace. Passion beat within him.
The humblest duties, the most trivial anxieties, where Radowitz was concerned, fell, week by week, increasingly to Falloden's portion.
The other two are my friends they will be always my friends. But there is something in Falloden's soul that I hate that I would like to fight till either he drops or I. It is the same sort of feeling I have towards those who have killed my country." He lay frowning, his blue eyes sombrely fixed and strained.
Constance meanwhile stood in some embarrassment with one hand on the back of a chair a charming vision in her close fitting habit, and the same black tricorne that she had worn in the Lathom Woods, at Falloden's side. "I came to bring you a book, Otto, the book we talked of yesterday." She held out a paper-covered volume. "But I mustn't stay." "Oh, do stay!" he implored her.
But under the gentleness, Constance opened again, and expanded. Mrs. Mulholland seemed to watch her with increasing kindness. At last, she said abruptly "I have already heard of you from two charming young men." Constance opened a pair of conscious eyes. It was as though she were always expecting to hear Falloden's name, and protecting herself against the shock of it.
That black sling and the damaged hand in it stood for one of those hard facts that no wishing, and no sentimentalising, and no remorse could get over. "I wish to God I had let him alone!" That now was the frequent and bitter cry of Falloden's inmost being. Trouble and the sight of trouble sorrow and death had been to him, as to other men, sobering and astonishing facts.
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