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By George, sir," the Colonel exclaimed, growing hot and red at the memory of that afternoon on the Holkers' lawn, "I don't like to see those women's eyes fixed upon my cheek when there's anything going on I don't want them to know. A man's transparent like glass before them. They see into his very soul. They look right through him."
When the news reached Elma, she saw its full and fatal significance. Cyril had stopped on for three days at the Holkers', and he came over in the course of the morning to take a walk across the fields with her. Elma was profoundly excited, Cyril could hardly see why. "This is a terrible thing," she said, "about Sir Gilbert's illness.
To be sure, he had only seen Elma once that afternoon at the Holkers' garden-party. But, as Cyril himself knew, he had fallen in love with her at first sight far more immediately, indeed, than even Cyril himself had done. Blood, as usual, was thicker than water.
I LIKED you in the train that day; I was GRATEFUL to you in the accident; I knew I LOVED you the afternoon we met at the Holkers'. There, I've told you that plainly more plainly than I thought I ever could tell it to any man on earth because we knew one another so well when we thought we were dying side by side, and because because I can see you really love me.... Well, it can never be.
Cyril Waring read it out with a little thrill of triumph. To be sure, it was by no means certain that Elma would be there; but still, Chetwood Court was well within range of Tilgate town, and Montague Nevitt felt convinced, he said, the Holkers were friends of the Cliffords and the Kelmscotts.
So he expected to meet them some day, at the Academy private view, perhaps, or in Mrs. Bouverie Barton's literary saloon, but certainly NOT on the close sward of the Holkers' lawn, within a few short miles of his own home at Tilgate. And now he had met them, his conscience, that had lain asleep so long, woke up of a sudden with a terrible start, and began to prick him fiercely.
But the deepest sorrow wears away by degrees, and at the end of twelve months Cyril found he could mix a little more unreservedly at last among his fellow-men. The hang-dog air sat ill upon his frank, free nature. This invitation to the Holkers', too, had one special attraction: he knew it was a house where he was almost certain of meeting Elma.
At the Holkers' at Chetwood, one evening some days later, Cyril Waring met Elma Clifford once more, the first time for months, and had twenty minutes' talk in the tea-room alone with her.
She couldn't meet Cyril now without thinking at once of that irresistible impulse which had seized her by the throat, as it were, and bent her to its wild will in her own room after their interview at the Holkers'; and the thought did far more than bring a deep blush into her rich brown cheek it made her feel most acutely she must never dream of burdening him with that terrible uncertainty and all it might enclose in it of sinister import.
He looked so handsome and so manly that afternoon at the Holkers'. Elma hoped she'd be asked out where he was going to be again.
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