A startled look came into his eyes.
"What?" he said, quickly.
He threw his cigarette away and turned towards her, with a sort of
tenseness that suggested to her a man bracing himself for some ordeal.
"Only about Emile."
"Oh!" he said.
He took another cigarette, and his attitude at once looked easier. She
wondered why.
"You don't mind about Emile being here, do you?"
Maurice was nearly answering quickly that he was delighted to welcome
him. But a suddenly born shrewdness prevented him. To-day, like a guilty
man, he was painfully conscious, painfully alert. He knew that Hermione
was wondering about him, and realized that her question afforded him an
opportunity to be deceptive and yet to seem quite natural and truthful.
He could not be as he had been, to-day. The effort was far too difficult
for him. Hermione's question showed him a plausible excuse for his
peculiarity of demeanor and conduct. He seized it.
"I think it was very natural for you to bring him," he answered.
He lit the cigarette. His hand was trembling slightly.
"But--but you had rather I hadn't brought him?"
As Maurice began to act a part an old feeling returned to him, and almost
turned his lie into truth.
"You could hardly expect me to wish to have Artois with us here, could
you, Hermione?" he said, slowly.
She scarcely knew whether she were most pained or pleased. She was pained
that anything she had done had clouded his happiness, but she was
intensely glad to think he loved to be quite alone with her.
"No, I felt that. But I felt, too, as if it would be cruel to stop short,
unworthy in us."
"In us?"
"Yes. You let me go to Africa. You might have asked me, you might even
have told me, not to go. I did not think of it at the time. Everything
went so quickly. But I have thought of it since. And, knowing that,
realizing it, I feel that you had your part, a great part, in Emile's
rescue. For I do believe, Maurice, that if I had not gone he would have
died."
"Then I am glad you went."
He spoke perfunctorily, almost formally. Hermione felt chilled.
"It seemed to me that, having begun to do a good work, it would be finer,
stronger, to carry it quite through, to put aside our own desires and
think of another who had passed through a great ordeal. Was I wrong,
Maurice? Emile is still very weak, very dependent. Ought I to have said,
'Now I see you're not going to die, I'll leave you at once.' Wouldn't it
have been rather selfish, even rather brutal?"