There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a special intention;as to the most marked of which--unless indeed it were the most obscure--she might well have marvelled that it didn't seem to her more horrid.It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the disorder of his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision of his putting down redundant money--sovereigns not concerned with the little payments he was perpetually making--so that she might give him some sign of helping him to slip them over to her.What was most extraordinary in this impression was the amount of excuse that,with some incoherence,she found for him.He wanted to pay her because there was nothing to pay her for.He wanted to offer her things he knew she wouldn't take.He wanted to show her how much he respected her by giving her the supreme chance to show HIM she was respectable.Over the dryest transactions,at any rate,their eyes had out these questions.On the third day he put in a telegram that had evidently something of the same point as the stray sovereigns--a message that was in the first place concocted and that on a second thought he took back from her before she had stamped it.He had given her time to read it and had only then bethought himself that he had better not send it.If it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle--where she knew her ladyship then to be--this was because an address to Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood was just as good,with the added merit of its not giving away quite so much a person whom he had still,after all,in a manner to consider.It was of course most complicated,only half lighted;but there was,discernibly enough,a scheme of communication in which Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Dr.Buzzard at Brickwood were,within limits,one and the same person.The words he had shown her and then taken back consisted,at all events,of the brief but vivid phrase "Absolutely impossible."The point was not that she should transmit it;the point was just that she should see it.What was absolutely impossible was that before he had setted something at Cocker's he should go either to Twindle or to Brickwood.
The logic of this,in turn,for herself,was that she could lend herself to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew.What she knew was that he was,almost under peril of life,clenched in a situation:therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the P.O.might really stand?It was more and more between them that if he might convey to her he was free,with all the impossible locked away into a closed chapter,her own case might become different for her,she might understand and meet him and listen.
But he could convey nothing of the sort,and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power.The chapter wasn't in the least closed,not for the other party;and the other party had a pull,somehow and somewhere:this his whole attitude and expression confessed,at the same time that they entreated her not to remember and not to mind.So long as she did remember and did mind he could only circle about and go and come,doing futile things of which he was ashamed.He was ashamed of his two words to Dr.Buzzard;he went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the paper again and thrust it into his pocket.It had been an abject little exposure of dreadful impossible passion.He appeared in fact to be too ashamed to come back.He had once more left town,and a first week elapsed,and a second.He had had naturally to return to the real mistress of his fate;she had insisted--she knew how to insist,and he couldn't put in another hour.There was always a day when she called time.It was known to our young friend moreover that he had now been dispatching telegrams from other offices.She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing.There were no different shades of distinctness--it all bounced out.
