So she would not be in the way, this little individual. She made him think, now that he looked at her more attentively, as she sat there with her trimly, accurately moving hand, of a beaver he had once seen swiftly and automatically feeding itself; her sleek head, her large, smooth front teeth, were like a beaver’s. It was really very decent of her to see that he wanted her out of the way; so decent that, conscious of the link it had made between them, he said presently, abruptly and rather roughly, “How is she?”
“Well, of course she has not recovered,” said Miss Allen.
“Recovered? But she wasn’t actually ill.” Grainger had a retorting air.
“No; I suppose not. It was nervous prostration, I suppose--if that’s not an illness.”
“This isn’t the place for her to recover from nervous prostration in.” He seemed to fasten an accusation, but Miss Allen understood perfectly.
“Of course not. I’ve tried to make her see that. But,”--she was making now quite a chain of links,--“she feels she must work, must lose herself in something. Of course she overdoes it. She overdoes everything.”
“Overwork, do you think? The cause, I mean?”
Grainger jerked this out, keeping his eyes on the square.
Miss Allen, not in any discreet hesitation, but in sincere uncertainty, paused over her answer.
“It couldn’t be, quite. She was well enough when she went away in the summer, though she really isn’t at all strong,--not nearly so strong as she looks. She broke down, you know, at her uncle’s, in Scotland”; and Miss Allen added, in a low-pitched and obviously confidential voice, “I think it was some shock that nobody knows anything about.”
Grainger stood still for some moments, and then plunging back into the little room, he crossed and re-crossed it with rapid strides. Her guessing and his knowledge came too near.
Only after a long pause did Miss Allen say, “She’s really frightfully changed.” The clock was on the stroke. Rising, gathering up her work, dropping, with neat little clicks, her scissors, her thimble, into her work-box, she added, and she fixed her eyes on him for a moment as she spoke, “Do, if you can, make her--“
“Well, what? Go away?” he demanded. “I’ve no authority--none. Her people ought to kidnap her. That’s what I’d do. Lift her out of this hole.”