“Mrs. Butterick told you that?” she said.

“Yes—­she spoke like a book.  Like the book of Revelations.  Now, when I’d expressly asked you if I should be alone when I came down, what the deuce did you want to come for?”

“Don’t you think you can speak a little more politely?” she requested.

“That won’t help the discussion from your side or mine,” he replied quietly.  “But rather than give you cause for interruption—­I’ll do so.  Why did you come down here?”

The mind of a woman works with amazing rapidity, but it is impossible to see the direction it will take.  There are little insects known to our childish days as skip-jacks.  Scratch them with the end of a piece of grass, and they reward you for your pains—­they will jump—­bound with one spasmodic leap and vanish.  So is the working of a woman’s mind.  You can be almost certain of the jump—­but of the direction—­never.

“Why?” Traill insisted, and then Mrs. Durlacher turned her gaze to the window, looked far away across the stretch of fields ploughed and green, beyond the blue, rising land that lifts above Wycombe, into that distance which holds all the intricate mysteries of a woman’s being.  When a woman looks like this, a man strains eyes to follow her.  He realizes all the distance, but cannot with his utmost effort decipher what it contains.  And that very inability in him is the strongest weapon that she holds.  He sees the distance, yet there is none.  No wonder that he cannot discern its contents.  There is no distance.  She is looking inwards—­not outwards; searching her own mind, searching his, and only playing the game of contemplation to hide what she has found.

When Traill saw that expression of her face, he dropped the note of brass from his voice.

“Why?” he asked again, almost gently.

Her lips bound tight together as though she were keeping back her confession; her nostrils dilated, checking tears.

“I wanted to see you—­that’s all.”

She said it with a shrug of the shoulders—­the motion with which you shake an unwelcome thought from your mind.

He pressed her further.  “But you apparently knew I was bringing some one?” he said.

She still looked towards her invisible horizon.  “I guessed that—­guessed that from your letter—­the way you said you wanted to find no one down here.  I thought you wouldn’t mind my coming—­besides—­there was no one to order anything for you, and then—­as I said—­I wanted to see you.”

“Yes, but why?” He took her arm, held the elbow in the cup of his hand.

She looked once more—­looked long into her distance—­then turned, petulantly almost, with a smothered sigh to the fireplace, rested her feet upon the fender, and redirected her gaze into the heart of the fire.

“Oh, it’s no good talking about it now,” she said.  “Miss Bishop ’11 be down in a minute.”

“Aren’t you happy?  That it?”