III

Summary

Yet he was to feel too the length that even forgiving her would have to go—for Jane at least—when, a couple of days later, they both, from the drawing-room window, saw, to their liveliest astonishment, the girl alight at the gate. She had taken a fly from the station, and their attention caught her as she paused apparently to treat with the cabman of the question of his waiting for her or coming back. It seemed settled in a moment that he should wait; he didn't remount his box, and she came in and up the garden-path. Jane had already flushed, and with violence, at the apparition, and in reply to her companion's instant question had said: “Yes, I’ll see her if she has come back.”

“Well, she has come back.”

“She's keeping her cab—she hasn't come to stay.” Mrs. Traffle had gained a far door of retreat.

“You won't speak to her?”

“Only if she has come to stay. Then—volumes!”

He had remained near the window, held fast there by the weight of indefinite obligation that his wife's flight from the field shifted to his shoulders. “But if she comes back to stay what can Puddick do?”

This kept her an instant. “To stay till he marries her is what I mean.”

“Then if she asks for you—as she only must—am I to tell her that?”

Flushed and exalted, her hand on the door, Jane had for this question a really grand moment. “Tell her that if he will she shall come in—with your assent—for my four hundred.”

“Oh, oh!” he ambiguously sounded while she whisked away and the door from the hall was at the same time thrown open by the parlour-maid. “Miss Montravers!” announced, with a shake of anguish, that domestic, whose heightened colour and scared eyes conformed to her mistress's example. Traffle felt his own cheek, for that matter, unnaturally glow, and the very first of his observations as Mora was restored to his sight might have been that she alone of them all wore her complexion with no difference.