It is evening, however, before I have an opportunity of putting my resolve in practice.  At luncheon, there are the servants; all afternoon, Roger is closeted with his agent:  before we set off this morning, he never mentioned the agent:  he never figured at all in our day’s plan—­(I imagined that he was to be kept till to-morrow); and at dinner there are the servants again.  Thank God, they are gone now!  We are alone, Roger and I. We are sitting in my boudoir, as in my day-dreams, before his return, I had pictured us; but, alas! where is caressing proximity which figured in all my visions? where is the stool on which I was to sit at his feet, with head confidently leaned on his arm?  As it happens, Vick is sitting on the stool, and we occupy two arm-chairs, at civil distance from each other, much as if we had been married sixty years, and had hated each other for fifty-nine of them.  I am idly fiddle-faddling with a piece of work, and Roger—­is it possible?—­is stretching out his hand toward a book.

“You do not mean to say that you are going to read?” I say, in a tone of sharp vexation.

He lays it down again.

“If you had rather talk, I will not.”

“I am afraid,” say I, with a sour laugh, “that you have not kept much conversation for home use!  I suppose you exhausted it all, this morning, at Laurel Cottage!”

He passes his hand slowly across his forehead.

“Perhaps!—­I do not think I am in a very talking vein.”

“By-the-by,” say I, my heart beating thick, and with a hurry and tremor in my voice, as I approach the desired yet dreaded theme, “you have never told me what it was, besides Mr. Huntley’s debts, that you talked of this morning!—­you owned that you did not talk of business quite all the time!”

“Did I?”

He has forgotten his book now; across the flame of the candles, he is looking full and steadily at me.

“When I asked you, you said it was not about old times?—­of course—­” (laughing acridly)—­“I can imagine your becoming inimitably diffuse about them, but you told me, that, ‘No,’ you did not mention them.”

“I told truth.”

“You also said,” continue I, with my voice still trembling, and my pulses throbbing, “that it was not Algy that you were discussing!—­if I had been in your place, I could, perhaps, have found a good deal to say about him; but you told me that you never mentioned him.”

“We did not.”

“Then what did you talk about?” I ask, in strong excitement; “it must have been a very odd theme that you find such difficulty in repeating.”

Still he is looking, with searching gravity, full in my face.

“Do you really wish to know?”

I cannot meet his eyes:  something in me makes me quail before them.  I turn mine away, but answer, stoutly: 

“Yes, I do wish.  Why should I have asked, if I did not?”