Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/262

254 "The matter with him is that a couple of hours ago he had a great shock."

"A great shock?"

"I may as well mention it at last," Nick went on. "I had to say something to him in the lobby there, when we met—something I was pretty sure he couldn't like. I let him have it full in the face—it seemed to me better and wiser. I told him Juliet's married."

"Didn't he know it?" asked Biddy, who, with her face raised, had listened in deep stillness to every word that fell from her brother.

"How should he have known it? It has only just happened, and they've been so clever, for reasons of their own (those people move among a lot of considerations that are absolutely foreign to us), about keeping it out of the papers. They put in a lot of lies, and they leave out the real things."

"You don't mean to say Mr. Sherringham wanted to marry her!" Miss Tressilian ejaculated.

"Don't ask me what he wanted—I dare say we shall never know. One thing is very certain: that he didn't like my news and that I sha'n't soon forget the look in his face as he turned away from me, slipping out into the street. He was too much upset—he couldn't trust himself to come back; he had to walk about—he tried to walk it off."

"Let us hope he has walked it off!"

"Ah, poor fellow—he couldn't hold out to the end; he has had to come back and look at her once more. He knows she'll be sublime in these last scenes."

"Is he so much in love with her as that? What difference