"No," I answered, with what strictness of veracity you will observe.
I saw, by the way she dropped her great eyes and pushed a bit of gravel about with her toe, what had come over her again. Just as, on that Bank Holiday evening in the tea-garden in the Vale of Health, she had had Kitty, if not on her conscience, at any rate on her magnanimity, so she had her now. By reason of that slight emptiness and waiting state of her life (in spite of all that I could do), her thoughts still flew back. Between my departures in the mornings and returns again o' nights, reminiscences, the freer in their play that her work was merely mechanical, still occupied her. These reminiscences welled up again in her now, and, added to them, filling her breast completely, was that half-compunctious desire of the victress for the squaring of accounts that is to be found in the exercise of compassion.
And as I saw her perturbation, something welled up in me too. She did not know I was looking at her, but I was, and already I had begun to see the only thing that would be more than temporarily efficacious against these strayings. There was only one thing. A picture came into my mind of a woman who blew a kiss from the top of a bus, played on the floor on Sundays with her boy, and found her life full and happy....
"Oh, my darling," I thought as I looked at her, "is it so very, very long--so very long and empty?... Very well.... It will modify a good many plans, but better that.... Your life too shall be full--and your arms----"
When next she looked up there was, about her eyes, a tiny bright edging of tears that did not fall.
"Jeff," she said, unusually quickly, "Kitty's ill. She has attacks of some kind. I couldn't quite make it out. I suppose Miriam Levey'll tell us all about it on Wednesday. I know you don't like Miriam, but she's awfully troubled about Kitty, and thinks she ought to be looked after. Somebody told her--told Miriam--that poor Kitty'd been found one night walking round and round Lincolns Inn Fields, and when the policeman asked her, she couldn't remember at first where she lived. Oh, Jeff, it does seem so sad!"
Privately I found that horrible. It had been in Lincolns Inn Fields that Kitty and I had walked together, and to think of her still haunting the place, alone, I found very horrible. But if that horror was mine, it was not going to be Evie's if I could help it. I nodded gravely, and took her arm.