As he stood there, motionless,
silent, the water dripping from his clothes, Grace was as frightened
as though he had already offered her personal violence or held a
pistol to her head.
"What do you want?" she asked hoarsely, stepping back to the sofa.
Jenny had left the room.
"I want to see my niece," he answered, still without moving. She
recognised then, strangely, in his voice a terror akin to her own.
He also was afraid of something. Of what? It was not that his voice
shook or that his tongue faltered. But he was terrified . . . She
could feel his heart thumping behind the words.
"I'm sorry," she said. "You can't see her. She's upstairs resting."
She did not know whence the resolution had come that he was not, in
any case, to see Maggie; she did not know what catastrophe she
anticipated from their meeting. She was simply resolved, as though
acting under the blind orders of some other power, that Maggie
should not see him and that he should leave the house at once.
"I must see her," he said, and the desperate urgency in his voice
would have touched any one less terrified than Grace.
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