Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/326

320 him; but they somehow, at the present crisis, hinted at a probable absoluteness in any decree of the writer. He looked at Sarah's name and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into her mother's face, and then turned from it as if the face had declined to relax. But as it was, in a manner, as if Mrs. Newsome were thereby all the more, instead of the less, in the room, and were conscious, sharply and solely conscious, of himself, so he felt both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and take his punishment. By staying, accordingly, he took it—creeping softly and vaguely about and waiting for Sarah to come in. She would come in if he stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the sense of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety. It was not to be denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point of view of Woollett, in placing him thus at the mercy of her own initiative. It was very well to try to say he didn't care—that she might break ground when she would, might never break it at all if she wouldn't, and that he had no confession whatever to wait upon her with: he breathed from day to day an air that damnably required clearing, and there were moments when he quite ached to precipitate that process. He couldn't doubt that, should she only oblige him by surprising him just as he was then, a clarifying scene of some sort would result from the concussion.

He humbly circulated, in this spirit, till he suddenly had a fresh arrest. Both the windows of the room stood open to the balcony, but it was only now that, in the glass of the leaf of one of them, folded back, he caught a reflection quickly recognised as the colour of a lady's dress. Somebody had been then, all the while, on the balcony, and the person, whoever it might be, was so placed, between the windows, as to be hidden from him: while, on the other hand, the many sounds of the street had covered his own entrance and movements. If the person were Sarah he might on the spot therefore be served to his taste. He might lead her, by a move or two, up to the remedy for his vain tension; as to which, should he get nothing else from it, he would at least have the relief of pulling down the roof on their heads. There was fortunately no one at hand to observe—in respect to his valour—that even on this