As they walked through the scenery she said, “You’ll come to see me,” and she reminded him of his promise to go through the Isolde music with her.

“Mind, you have promised,” she said as she got into her carriage.

“You’ll not forget Saturday afternoon,” he said as he shook hands.

She nodded and put up her umbrella, for it was beginning to rain.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Evelyn found Owen waiting for her.  As soon as she came into the room he said, “Well, have you seen your father?”

She was not expecting him, and it was disagreeable to admit that she had not been to Dulwich.  So she said that she had thought to find her father at St. Joseph’s.

“But how did you know he was not at home if you did not go to Dulwich?”

“My gracious, Owen, how you do question me!  Now, perhaps you would like to know which of the priests told me.”

She walked to the window and stood with her left hand in the pocket of her jacket, and he feared that the irritation he had involuntarily caused her would interfere with his projects for the afternoon.  There passed in his eyes that look of absorption in an object which marks the end of a long love affair—­a look charged with remembrance, and wistful as an autumn day.

The earth has grown weary of the sun and turns herself into the shadow, eager for rest.  The sun has been too ardent a lover.  But the gaze of the sun upon the receding earth is fonder than his look when she raised herself to his bright face.  So in Owen’s autumn-haunted eyes there was dread of the chances which he knew were accumulating against him—­enemies, he divined, were gathering in the background; and how he might guard her, keep her for himself, became a daily inquisition.  Nothing had happened to lead him to think that his possession was endangered, his fear proceeded from an instinct, which he could not subdue, that she was gliding from him; he wrestled with the intangible, and, striving to subordinate instinct to reason, he often refrained from kissing her; he imitated the indifference which in other times he could not dissimulate when the women who had really loved him besought him with tears.  But there was no long gain-saying of the delight of telling her that he loved her, and when his aching heart forced him to question her regarding the truth of her feelings towards him, she merely told him that she loved him as much as ever, and the answer, instead of being a relief, was additional fuel upon the torturing flame of his uncertainty.