Harriott, on her stone seat at the back of the pavilion, could see Stephen Philpotts the very minute he came through the side door.
He had asked her to wait for him there. It was the place he always chose to read his poems aloud in. The poems were a pretext. She knew what he was going to say. And she knew what she would answer.
There were elder bushes in flower at the back of the pavilion, and Harriott thought of George Waring. She told herself that George was nearer to her now than he could ever have been, living. If she married Stephen she would not be unfaithful, because she loved him with another part of herself. It was not as though Stephen were taking George’s place. She loved Stephen with her soul, in an unearthly way.
But her body quivered like a stretched wire when the door opened and the young man came towards her down the drive under the beech trees.
She loved him; she loved his slenderness, his darkness and sallow whiteness, his black eyes lighting up with the intellectual flame, the way his black hair swept back from his forehead, the way he walked, tiptoe, as if his feet were lifted with wings.
He sat down beside her. She could see his hands tremble. She felt that her moment was coming; it had come.
“I wanted to see you alone because there’s something I must say to you. I don’t quite know how to begin....”
“You’ve heard me speak of Sybill Foster?”
Her voice came stammering, “N-no, Stephen. Did you?”
“Well, I didn’t mean to, till I knew it was all right. I only heard yesterday.”
“Why, that she’ll have me. Oh, Harriott—do you know what it’s like to be terribly happy?”
She knew. She had known just now, the moment before he told her. She sat there, stone-cold and stiff, listening to his raptures; listening to her own voice saying she was glad.
Harriott Leigh sat waiting in the drawing-room of a small house in Maida Vale. She had lived there ever since her father’s death two years before.
She was restless. She kept on looking at the clock to see if it was four, the hour that Oscar Wade had appointed. She was not sure that he would come, after she had sent him away yesterday.
She now asked herself, why, when she had sent him away yesterday, she had let him come to-day. Her motives were not altogether clear. If she really meant what she had said then, she oughtn’t to let him come to her again. Never again.