Steerforth in his room, I heard her dress rustle in the little gallery outside. When he and I engaged in some of our old exercises on the lawn behind the house, I saw her face pass from window to window, like a wandering light, until it fixed itself in one, and watched us. When we all four went out walking in the afternoon, she closed her thin hand on my arm like a spring, to keep me back, while Steerforth and his mother went on out of hearing: and then spoke to me.
"You have been a long time," she said, "without coming here. Is your profession really so engaging and interesting as to absorb your whole attention? I ask because I always want to be informed, when I am ignorant. Is it really, though?
I replied that I liked it well enough, but that I certainly could not claim so much for it.
"Oh! I am glad to know that, because I always like to be put right when I am wrong," said Kosa Dartle. "You mean it is a little dry, perhaps?"
Well, I replied; perhaps it was a little dry.
"Oh! and that's a reason why you want relief and change—excitement, and all that?" said she. "Ah! very true! But isn't it a little——Eh?— for him; I don't mean you?"
A quick glance of her eye towards the spot where Steerforth was walking, with his mother leaning on his arm, showed me whom she meant; but beyond that, I was quite lost. And I looked so, I have no doubt.
"Don't it—I don't say that it does, mind I want to know—don't it rather engross him? Don't it make him, perhaps, a little more remiss than usual in his visits to his blindly doting—eh?" With another quick glance at them, and such a glance at me as seemed to look into my innermost thoughts.
"Miss Dartle," I returned, "pray do not think—"
"I don't!" she said. "Oh, dear me, don't suppose that I think anything! I am not suspicious. I only ask a question. I don't state any opinion. I want to found an opinion on what you tell me. Then, it's not so? Well! I am very glad to know it."
"It certainly is not the fact," said I, perplexed, "that I am accountable for Steerforth's having been away from home longer than usual—if he has been: which I really don't know at this moment, unless I understand it from you. I have not seen him this long while, until last night."
"No?"
"Indeed, Miss Dartle, no!"
As she looked full at me, I saw her face grow sharper and paler, and the marks of the old wound lengthen out until it cut through the disfigured lip, and deep into the nether lip, and slanted down the face. There was something positively awful to me in this, and in the brightness of her eyes, as she said, looking fixedly at me:
"What is he doing?"
I repeated the words, more to myself than her, being so amazed.
"What is he doing?" she said, with an eagerness that seemed enough to consume her like a fire. "In what is that man assisting him, who never looks at me without an inscrutable falsehood in his eyes? If you are honorable and faithful, I don't ask you to betray your friend. I ask
