Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/248

240 again. He took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes.

"It's all right, if she knows I am. But why doesn't she come like any one else? I don't refuse people! "

"Nick, dearest Nick!" she went on, with her eyes conscious and pleading. He looked into them intently—as well as she, he could play at sounding—and for a moment, between these young persons, the air was lighted by the glimmer of mutual searchings and suppressed confessions. Nick read deep, and then, suddenly releasing his sister, he turned away. She didn't see his face in that movement, but an observer to whom it had been presented might have fancied that it denoted a foreboding which was not exactly a dread, yet was not exclusively a joy.

The first thing Nick made out in the room, when he could distinguish, was Gabriel Nash's portrait, which immediately filled him with an unreasoning resentment. He seized it and turned it about; he jammed it back into its corner, with its face against the wall. This bustling transaction might have served to carry off the embarrassment with which he had finally averted himself from Biddy. The embarrassment however was all his own; none of it was reflected in the way Biddy resumed, after a silence in which she had followed his disposal of the picture:

"If she's so eager to come here (for it's here that she wants to sit, not in Great Stanhope Street—never!) how can she prove better that she doesn't care a bit if she meets Miss Rooth?"

"She won't meet Miss Rooth," Nick replied, rather dryly.