Suddenly Quisanté spoke. What he said was not free from consciousness of self, from that perpetual presence of self to self which is common enough in men of great ability and ambition, and yet never ceases to be a flaw; but he said it soberly enough; there were no flourishes.
"You can't be half-friends with me," he said. "I must be taken as I am, good and bad. You must let me alone, or take me for better for worse."
May smiled at the phrase he had happened on and its familiar associations--surely so out of place here. But she followed his meaning and appreciated his seriousness. She could answer him neither by an only half-sincere assurance that she was ready to be entire friends, nor yet by a joking evasion of his point.
"Yes, I see: I expect that is so," she said in a troubled voice; it was so very hard to take him for worse, and it was rather hard to resolve to make no effort at taking him for better. She forced a laugh, as she said, "I'll think about it, Mr. Quisanté."
As she spoke, she raised her eyes to his; a low, hardly audible exclamation escaped her lips before she was conscious of it. If ever a man spoke plainly without words what was in his soul, Quisanté spoke it then. She could not miss the meaning of his eyes; all unprepared as she was, it came home to her in a minute with a shock of wonder that forbade either pain or pleasure and seemed to leave her numb. Now she saw how truly she, no less than the others, had treated him as an outsider, as a tool, as something to be used, not as one of their own world. For she had never thought of his falling in love with her, and had never considered him in that point of view at all. Yet he had, and here lay the reason why he flirted no more, and why he would have her sympathy only on even terms. Here also, it seemed, was the reason why his tricks were forgotten, why he was simple and direct; here was the incitement to imagination, the ideal, the passion that had power to fire and purge his soul.
"We must go in," she whispered in a shaking voice. "We must go in, Mr. Quisanté."
Another week had gone by, and, although nothing very palpable had happened, there was a sort of vague scare in the house-party. It touched everybody, affecting them in different ways according to their characters, but raising in all an indignant protest against a fact hardly credible and a danger scarcely to be named. Not even Mrs. Baxter, entrenched in placidity and petticoats, quite escaped its influence; even Morewood's cynical humour hesitated to play on a situation so unexpected, possibly so serious. Lady Richard's alarm was the most outspoken, and her dismay the most clamorous; yet perhaps in Dick Benyon himself was the strongest fear. For if that did happen which seemed to be happening beneath the incredulous gaze of their eyes, who but he was responsible, to whose account save his could the result be laid? He had brought the man into the circle, into the house, into the knowledge of his friends; but for him Quisanté might have been carving a career far away, or have given up any idea of one at all.