"Ah but don't say it as if I were going to drag you to the assizes or the pillory!" Sir Cantopher gave way to that special shade of his amusement which was somehow all edges and points.
Ralph winced for a moment as one who feels in an offered love-pat the touch of a prickly glove--winced fairly to the extent of again dropping his presence of mind and once more snatching it up. "_Is_ that the way I say it?" he asked of Molly with such a flush of tender protest as to make her fix him an instant with the very widest eyes she had yet opened and then come at him straight. She didn't speak as she crossed to him, and it was wondrous to him to feel and to know a few seconds later that this was because the attempt for her would have been but formless sound. She answered him otherwise; her arms were round his neck and her face pressed there, while, with his own gratefully bent to it, he felt her hold him in a clasp of possession that was like a resistance to something unseen. He couldn't for that minute himself speak, though the sense of his clutch articulated would have been "Hold me, yes; hold me close, close, and let us stay this way!" They did stay in fact--or when he next measured time it was as if they had been wholly and incalculably absent: so absent, and for so long, that on his reckoning again with the conditions about him they struck him at once as different and as somehow mastered. Had he literally and in so extraordinary a manner slept in his mistress's arms? There was no one to ask it of but poor Perry--for Sir Cantopher apparently had in the interval departed, Mrs. Midmore attending him out of sight, and Molly, herself aware of that, was already at the door, her hand on it for the moment, holding it open, while her look at him recognised even to extravagance what they had "done"--as if she wanted him to know that she knew it, though with something in it for her too that drove her, as he might feel, before it.
This was not prolonged, and yet Ralph could note, for his bewilderment, that some time must already have elapsed, since there came in to him by the open door, from hall or staircase, no after-sound of Mrs. Midmore's retirement with her friend. That explained itself, however, with his quick apprehension that they would have passed out by the other door of the room, which was ajar, as it hadn't been before, and which communicated, as he was afterwards to know, with other parts of the ample house, including the secondary staircase and his kinswoman's boudoir--he was for the first time in his life really to conceive that last convenience. He was at any rate apparently to be left alone with Perry, not taking leave of the others, but suddenly quitted by them or with Molly, for the next thing, at the most, committing him a little portentously to her brother. For she had in a few seconds more turned her eyes to Perry, who spoke at once as if she had put him a mute question and as if he had caught some sound from below. This sound in fact, as more of it came by Molly's door, reached Ralph sufficiently to explain her brother's lively comment, the liveliest he had yet uttered on anything at all: "It's Nan, it's Nan!"