for him. She remembered with horrible distinctness his words, ' I want to be fire,' and they, which at the moment had seemed to her but an expression of the ever unsatisfied yearning of love, which always, however perfect, still desires to go yet deeper, now wore a more sinister interpretation, and were to her the kindling of a secret heart-burning. What if this natural and simplest interpretation was true? What if he had never really felt fire for her?
Such was the abbreviated reading of her spiritual diary down to the day when she drove to see her father. Though he had been in London all this last month, she had scarcely set eyes on him, so immersed had he been in the railroad business, and it was with a childish eagerness that she looked forward to having a long talk with him. In the trouble of her mind she felt great longing for that kind, unwearied affection which he ever had for her—an affection not very demonstrative, but extraordinarily real and solid. The effusiveness of her mother's love just now was less satisfying to her, for Mrs. Palmer had been for the last six weeks a mere whirling atom in the mill of social success; and while one hand, so to speak, was entwined round Amelie's neck in a maternal embrace, the other would be scribbling notes of invitation and regret to the flower of England's nobility.
She got to the house rather late for lunch, and was struck by the resemblance which the moral atmosphere of the dining-room bore to that of Basle railway-station. There was the same sense that everybody was just going to catch a train; that they were exchanging last words as they took their hurried meal. Her father, next whom she sat, was an exception, for he ate his thin slices of toasted Hovis bread and drank his milk with the deliberateness which his digestion demanded; but everyone else seemed to be unable to attend to what was going on at this moment, because they all were thinking of what they would be doing the next.
