Lucilla asked for Oscar the moment after he had left us.

Nugent answered that Oscar had gone back to the house to get his hat.
The sound of Nugent's voice helped her to calculate her distance from him without assistance from me.

Still holding my arm, she stopped and spoke to him.
"Nugent," she said, "I have made Oscar tell me--what he ought to have told me long since." (She paused between each sentence; painfully controlling herself, painfully catching her breath.) "He has discovered a foolish antipathy of mine.

I don't know how; I tried to keep it a secret from him.

I need not tell you what it is." She made a longer pause at those words, holding me closer and closer to her; struggling more and more painfully against the irresistible nervous loathing that had got possession of her.
He listened, on his side, with the constraint which always fell upon him in her presence more marked than ever.