Not until she had disappeared did I myself move from the spot I had occupied since I had taken my first two strides into the room.
"Just turn that thing with its face to the wall; I don't want to see it till morning," said Billy, bustling about. "Sha'n't be a minute----"
He dashed out with a cake of soap and a handful of brushes. The tap was on the landing below. From behind the screen came soft sounds as Miss Causton dressed....
I have wasted paper in trying to set down what my thoughts and sensations were. Not to waste any more, I will tell you instead what I did. It was some minutes later, and already the running of the tap at which Billy was washing his brushes below had ceased. Time pressed. Without quite knowing how I got there, I was standing by the screen. I spoke in a low and very hurried voice.
"I can't see you now--I'm late already," I said.
Miss Causton's voice had formerly been drawlingly slow, but it came back quickly enough now, and altogether without surprise.
"Yes, yes--I want to see you too--quick--how late shall you be?"
"I don't know--eleven--I can't ask you to wait----"
"I'll wait--I'll have my dinner here----"
Then, breathlessly, "Swan & Edgar's, at eleven----"
"Sssh--there's no time to talk--there, at eleven----"
Billy came in again, but I was away from the screen by then. "Better hurry, unless you want a cold dinner," I said, moving towards the door; and "Better hurry yourself," I heard him say as I left....
I dashed across the road for a bus that was just starting; but it was not for some minutes after I had settled myself inside it that I began to realise what I had just done.
Then as bit by bit I grew calmer, it struck me as in the last degree remarkable. What had so suddenly impelled me to say, "I can't see you now?" And why had she replied that she too wished to see me? Why should I have wished to see her at all? Or she me? And why that long, long stare of eyes into eyes?
Robson, the Berkeley, my painfully marshalled statement, Pepper and Hastie and Campbell and all--these things had gone as completely out of my mind as if they had had no bearing at all on my life and fortunes.
I had squeezed into a corner of the bus farthest from the door, and the vehicle had glass panels forward. These were blurred with a fresh shower, orange squares, with now the halo of a lamp moving slowly past, now a muffled or umbrella-ed figure. We pulled up for a moment before the pear-shaped globes of a chemist's window, ruby and emerald, and then went forward again, and I seemed once more to hear that breathless "Swan & Edgar's--eleven," and my own "No, no!"...