When he awoke, he found it so late, that it was all he could do to get
down in time for breakfast. But so anxious was he not to be later than
usual, that he was in the room before Mr. Arnold made his appearance.
Euphra, however, was there before him. She greeted him in the usual way,
quite circumspectly. But she looked troubled. Her face was very pale, and
her eyes were red, as if from sleeplessness or weeping. When her uncle
entered, she addressed him with more gaiety than usual, and he did not
perceive that anything was amiss with her. But the whole of that day she
walked as in a reverie, avoiding Hugh two or three times that they chanced
to meet without a third person in the neighbourhood. Once in the forenoon—when
she was generally to be found in her room—he could not refrain from
trying to see her. The change and the mystery were insupportable to him.
But when he tapped at her door, no answer came; and he walked back to
Harry, feeling, as if, by an unknown door in his own soul, he had been
shut out of the half of his being. Or rather—a wall seemed to have
been built right before his eyes, which still was there wherever he went.
As to the gliding phantom of the previous night, the day denied it all,
telling him it was but the coinage of his own over-wrought brain, weakened
by prolonged tension of the intellect, and excited by the presence of
Euphra at an hour claimed by phantoms when not yielded to sleep. This was
the easiest and most natural way of disposing of the difficulty. The cloud
around Euphra hid the ghost in its skirts.
Although fear in some measure returned with the returning shadows, he yet
resolved to try to get Euphra to meet him again in the library that night.
But she never gave him a chance of even dropping a hint to that purpose.
She had not gone out with them in the morning; and when he followed her
into the drawing-room, she was already at the piano. He thought he might
convey his wish without interrupting the music; but as often as he
approached her, she broke, or rather glided, out into song, as if she had
been singing in an undertone all the while. He could not help seeing she
did not intend to let him speak to her. But, all the time, whatever she
sang was something she knew he liked; and as often as she spoke to him in
the hearing of her uncle or cousin, it was in a manner peculiarly graceful
and simple.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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