ONE:Ah! where had my wits been? Yet without a suspicion that she was Charlotte Oliver one might have let the anagram go unsuspected for a lifetime. Evidently it concealed nothing from General Austin or Ned Ferry; most likely it was only the name she used in passing through the lines. At any rate I was convinced she was a good Confederate, and my heart rose.For a moment it was a mere tussle of will between them, and Norahs reasons were the stronger. She looked at him a moment, and knew she had won, and without more words went back to the library and put on her over-boots, and gathered up the book-slips she had made that evening. He followed her as far as the hall, and waited for her.
We listened again. "They've gone the wrong way," I said, still savage.FAN-MAKERS AT WORK. FAN-MAKERS AT WORK."Well, neither shall I."Mr Silverdale got up off the hearthrug where he had been sitting nursing his knees with miraculous celerity. She behind her hidden eyes heard{208} him and knew, she felt she knew, that in another moment would come the touch of his hands on hers as he took them, and bade her look at him. Perhaps he would say, Look at me, my darling; perhaps his delicious joking ways would even at this sublimest of moments still assert themselves and he would say Peep-o! But whatever he did would be delicious, would be perfect. But no touch came on her hands, and there was a long, an awful moment of dead silence, while behind poor Alices hands the dazzle died out of her vision. Before it was broken, she perceived that beyond a shadow of doubt he did not mean her, and both were tongue-tied, he in the shame of having provoked a passion he had no use for, she in the shame of having revealed the passion he had not invited. She had come to the wrong house: she was an unbidden guest who must be directed outside the front-door again.
