Meanwhile, the servant stood before her in an attitude of respectful attention.
"I will see Mr. Saton," she decided at last. "You can show him in here, and remember that until he has gone, no one else is to be allowed to enter. Come yourself only if I ring the bell, or when you serve tea."
The man bowed, and went back to where Saton was waiting in the hall.
"Her ladyship is at home, sir," he announced. "Will you come this way?"
A certain drawn expression seemed suddenly to vanish from the young man's face. He followed the servant almost blithely. In a few seconds he was alone with her in the firelit drawing-room. The door was closed behind him.
Pauline was sitting up on the couch. For a moment they neither of them spoke. She, too, had been suffering, then, he thought, recognising the signs of ill-health in her colorless cheeks and languid pose.
He came slowly across the room and held out his hand. She hesitated, and shook her head.
"No!" she said. "I do not think that I wish to shake hands with you, Mr. Saton. I do not understand why you have come here. I thought it best to see you, and hear what you have to say, once and for all."
"Certainly," she answered. "It does not interest me to fence with words. Between us I think that it is not necessary. What do you want with me?"
She paused for a moment or two. She told herself that this was the most transcendental of follies. Yet it seemed as though there were something electrical in the atmosphere, as though something had come into the room unaccountable, stimulating, terrifying. All the languor of the last few days was gone.
"Am I to understand, then?" she said at last, speaking in a low tone, and with her face averted from him, "that you have come to offer me some explanation of the events of that night?"
The seconds ticked on. She found his taciturnity maddening.
"Your visit had some purpose?" she asked.
"I am not well," she said, hurriedly. "I am not fit to see people or to talk at all. I thought that you must have some special purpose in coming, or I should not have received you."
"You wish to talk then, about that night?" he asked.
She sat upright. She looked him in the eyes.
"I have not dared to ask even myself this," she said, "but since you are here, since you have forced it upon me, I shall ask you and you will tell me. That night I had--what shall I call it?--a vision. I saw you shoot Henry Rochester. Now you are here you shall tell me if what I saw was the truth?"