Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/188

180 after all, had he ever given it to better him or bother him? If the pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily charged with the genuine British mistrust of the bothersome principle as if the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but there was an immemorial compact formation which lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest upon it spiritually, but found it inelastic; and at the very moment when he was most conscious of this absence of the rebound or of any tolerable ease his vision was solicited by an object which, as he immediately guessed, could only add to the complication of things.

An undefined shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become aware of Peter's observation, and then whisked round the corner of the little villa. This characteristic movement so effectually dispelled the mystery (it could only be Mrs. Rooth who resorted to such conspicuous secrecies) that, to feel that the game was up and his interview over, Sherringham had no need of seeing the figure reappear on second thoughts and dodge about in the dusk with a vexatious sportive imbecility. Evidently Miriam's warning of a few minutes before had been founded: a cab had deposited her anxious mother at the garden-door. Mrs. Rooth had entered with precautions; she had approached the house and retreated; she had effaced herself—had peered and waited and listened. Maternal solicitude and muddled calculations