‘Certainly, certainly, by no means,’ he began, listening vaguely to the
glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. ‘Your father, my
dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to
recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course—two heads,
we know, are so much better than one when there’s the least—the least
difficulty. The great thing is quiet, rest, isolation, no possibility
of a shock, else—’ His voice fell away, his eloquence failed. For Alice stood gazing stirlessly on and on into this infinitely
strange, infinitely familiar shadowy, phantasmal face. ‘Oh yes,’ she
replied, ‘I quite understand, of course; but if I might just peep even,
it would—I should be so much, much happier. Do let me just see him, Dr
Ferguson, if only his head on the pillow! I wouldn’t even breathe. Couldn’t it possibly help—even a faith-cure?’ She leant forward
impulsively, her voice trembling, and her eyes still shining beneath
their faint, melancholy smile. ‘I fear, my dear...it cannot be. He longs to see you. But with his
mind, you know, in this state, it might—?’

‘But mother never told me,’ broke in the girl desperately, ‘there was
anything wrong with his _mind_. Oh, but that was quite unfair. You
don’t mean, you don’t mean—that—?’

Lawford scanned swiftly the little square beloved and memoried room
that fate had suddenly converted for him into a cage of unspeakable
pain and longing. ‘Oh no; believe me, no! Not his brain, not that, not
even wandering; really: but always thinking, always longing on and on
for you, dear, only. Quite, quite master of himself, but—’

‘You talk,’ she broke in again angrily, ‘only in pretence! You are
treating me like a child; and so does mother, and so it has been ever
since I came home. Why, if mother can, and you can, why may not I? Why,
if he can walk and talk in the night....’

‘But who—who “can walk and talk in the night?”’ inquired a low stealthy
voice out of the quietness behind her. Alice turned swiftly. Her mother was standing at a little distance,
with all the calm and moveless concentration of a waxwork figure,
looking up at her from the staircase. ‘I was—I was talking to Dr Ferguson, mother.’

‘But as I came up the stairs I understood you to be inquiring something
of Dr Ferguson, “if,” you were saying, “he can walk and talk in the
night”: you surely were not referring to your father, child? That could
not possibly be, in his state. Dr Ferguson, I know, will bear me out in
that at least. And besides, I really must insist on following out
medical directions to the letter. Dr Ferguson I know, will fully
concur. Do, pray, Dr Ferguson,’ continued Sheila, raising her voice
even now scarcely above a rapid murmur—‘do pray assure my daughter that
she must have patience; that however much even he himself may desire
it, it is impossible that she should see her father yet. And now, my
dear child, come down, I want to have a moment’s talk with Dr Ferguson. I feared from his beckoning at the window that something was amiss.’

Alice turned, dismayed, and looked steadily, almost with hostility, at
the stranger, so curiously transfixed and isolated in her small old
play-room. And in this scornful yet pleading confrontation her eye fell
suddenly on the pin in his scarf—the claw and the pearl she had known
all her life. From that her gaze flitted, like some wild demented
thing’s, over face, hair, hands, clothes, attitude, expression, and her
heart stood still in an awful, inarticulate dread of the unknown. She
turned slowly towards her mother, groped forward a few steps, turned
once more, stretching out her hands towards the vague still figure
whose eyes had called so piteously to her out of their depths, and fell
fainting in the doorway. Lawford stood motionless, vacantly watching
Sheila, who knelt, chafing the cold hands. ‘She has fainted?’ he said;
‘oh, Sheila, tell me—only fainted?’

Sheila made no answer; did not even raise her eyes. ‘Some day, Sheila’ he began in a dull voice, and broke off, and without
another word, without even another glance at the still face and blue,
twitching lids, he passed her rapidly by, and in another instant Sheila
heard the house-door shut. She got up quickly, and after a glance into
the vacant bedroom turned the key; then she hastened upstairs for sal
volatile and eau de cologne.... It was yet clear daylight when Lawford appeared beneath the portico of
his house. With a glance of circumspection that almost seemed to
suggest a fear of pursuit, he descended the steps, only to be made
aware in so doing that Ada was with a kind of furtive eagerness
pointing out the mysterious Dr Ferguson to a steadily gazing cook. One
or two well-known and many a well-remembered face he encountered in the
thin stream of City men treading blackly along the pavement. It was a
still, high evening, and something very like a forlorn compassion rose
in his mind at sight of their grave, rather pretentious, rather dull,
respectable faces. He found himself walking with an affectation of effrontery, and smiling
with a faint contempt on all alike, as if to keep himself from
slinking, and the wolf out of his eyes. He felt restless, and watchful,
and suspicious, as if he had suddenly come down in the world. His,
then, was a disguise as effectual as a shabby coat and a glazing eye. His heart sickened. Was it even worth while living on a crust of social
respectability so thin and so exquisitely treacherous? He challenged no
one. One or two actual acquaintances raised and lowered a faintly
inquiring eyebrow in his direction. One even recalled in his confusion
a smile of recognition just a moment too late. There was, it seemed, a
peculiar aura in Lawford’s presence, a shadow of a something in his
demeanour that proved him alien. None the less green Widderstone kept calling him, much as a bell in the
imagination tolls on and on, the echo of reality. If the worst should
come to the worst, why—there is pasture in the solitary by-ways for the
beast that strays. He quickened his pace along lonelier streets, and
soon strode freely through the little flagged and cobbled village of
shops, past the same small jutting window whose clock had told him the
hour on that first dark hurried night. All was pale and faint with
dying colours now; and decay was in the leaf, and the last swallows
filled the gold air with their clashing stillness. No one heeded him
here. He looked from side to side, exulting in the strangeness. Shops
were left behind, the last milestone passed, and in a little while he
was descending the hill beneath the elm boughs, which he remembered had
stood like a turreted wall against the sunset when first he had
wandered down into the churchyard. At the foot of the hill he passed by the green and white Rectory, and
there was the parson, a short fat, pursy man with wrists protruding
from his jacket sleeves as he stood on tip-toe tying up a rambling
rose-shoot on his trim cedared lawn.