The painter, having grown a little serious and excited over his own tirade, ended it with a little laugh at himself, and she murmured with apparent inconsequence, “Oh, I think it such a pity--such a waste!”
“What do you mean?” he asked her, negligently, and stayed not for an answer--it was a little way he had. She would have been ashamed to admit to him what her meaning had been; that he was still young, that he was handsome, that, in her opinion, such a man was thrown away on the service of Nature. She changed the conversation by offering to read him some passages from the Newcastle paper.
He nodded in assent. She first gathered and fastened two large fern fronds behind each ear, as a clerk his pen, to keep away the flies which Rivers’ mistress Nature continued to send him. She felt herself already so hideously travestied, that an added touch of grotesqueness or so did not matter. Then she began to read aloud in her quick, impulsive way. She had not read more than a few sentences, when she stopped suddenly. The painter might, or might not, have been attending to her, but the sudden cessation of her voice inevitably excited his attention.
“I stopped. It was getting so dull in that part of the paper,” she said, confusedly, bent on herself getting the gist of a certain paragraph that had caught her eye.
It was an account of an archæological meeting that had recently been held in Newcastle, where Mr. Mortimer Elles had seconded the motion of somebody or other, and had “given an exceedingly humorous turn” to the debate.
She pored over it with a certain sense of bitterness, mingled with relief.
“So he is cheerful enough to make bad jokes! He is getting on all right. I need not have troubled to be anxious! He will have told all my friends and his that his gadding fool of a wife is away amusing herself on a visit. He is quite clever enough to invent some excuse like that! Men don’t care to admit that they have been run away from!”
Mr. Rivers had meanwhile idly taken up the few letters she had brought and laid down beside him as usual, ready to his hand. He was quite capable of leaving them for hours unopened, to her continual surprise and somewhat to her annoyance. She could not understand dilatoriness in such matters. But he was reading one now, of which the immense signature inevitably caught her eye. It was Egidia’s real name--Alice Giles--which she happened to know.