"Yes."
They rose and went together into the house.
In the hall, through the open door of the drawing-room, she could see
the table laid for tea, and Gertrude sitting at it by herself, waiting
for them. His sister and the children had gone. Somehow she knew that he
had made them go. They would come back, he explained, with the carriage
that was to take her to the station, and they would say good-bye to her
before she went.
He evaded the drawing-room door and led the way into his library; and
she knew that he meant to have the last hour with her alone.
She paused on the threshold. She knew that if she followed him she would
never get away.
"Aren't we going," said she, "to have tea with Miss Collett?"
"Would you rather?"
"Much rather," said she.
"Very well, just as you like," he said stiffly.
He was annoyed again. All through tea-time he sulked, while Jane
sustained a difficult conversation with Miss Collett.
Miss Collett had lost much of her beautiful serenity. She was still a
charming hostess, but there was a palpable effort about her charm. She
looked as if she were beginning to suffer from the strain of Brodrick in
his present mood.
What Brodrick's mood was, or was beginning to be, Jane could no longer
profess to be unaware. While she talked thin talk to Gertrude about the
superiority of Putney Heath to Wimbledon Park, and of Brodrick's house
to the houses of the other Brodricks, she was thinking, "This woman was
happy in his house before I came. He would have been happy with her if
I hadn't come. It would be kinder of me if I were to keep out of it, and
let her have her chance."
And when she had said good-bye to Mrs. Heron and the children, and found
herself in the doctor's brougham, shut up all alone with Brodrick, she
said to herself that it was for the last time. When she let him take her
back to Kensington Square, when she let him sit with her there for ten
minutes in the half-darkness, she said to herself that it was for the
last time. And when he rose suddenly, almost violently, for departure,
she knew it was for the last time.
"It was good of you," she said, "to bring me home."
"Do you call _this_ a home?" said Brodrick.
"Why not? It's all I want."
"Is it?" he said savagely, and left her.
He was intensely disagreeable; but that also, she told herself, was for
the last time.
As long as Brodrick was there she could listen to the voice inside her,
murmuring incessantly of last times, and ordering her to keep out of it
and let the poor woman have her chance.
But when he was gone another voice, that was there too, told her that
she could not keep out of it. She was being drawn in again, into the
toils of life. When it had seemed to her that she drew, she was being
drawn. She was drawn by all the things that she had cut herself off
from, by holding hands, and searching eyes, and unforgotten
tendernesses. In the half-darkness of her room the faces she had been
living with were all about her. She felt again the brushing of Winny's
hair over her cheek. She heard Winny's mother saying that she liked her.
She saw Brodrick sitting opposite her, and the look with which he had
watched her when he thought she was asleep.
And when the inward admonitory voice reiterated, "Don't be drawn," the
other answered, "Whether I'm out of it or in it the poor woman hasn't
got a chance."