Mrs. Reade's own marriage was very much of the same pattern in one respect—it was but an outward and visible sign of marriage that had no inward and spiritual grace; but then she did not know what it was that she missed, and Rachel did. And the difference between the two cases was perfectly obvious to that intelligent woman.
On the return of Mr. and Mrs. Kingston to Melbourne, a number of fashionable parties were of course given in their honour. At the chief of these, a great ball in the Town-hall, the dramatic action of this story, temporarily suspended by our heroine's absence from the country which held all its elements in solution, so to speak, was suddenly set going again.
It was towards the end of October, just when the gay season of the races was about to set in, and when the spring was in its glory. It strangely happened to be also the anniversary of the night of her clandestine betrothal to Roden Dalrymple, which was the memorable last time—two whole years ago—that she had seen or heard of him.
Nowadays she never mentioned Roden Dalrymple's name. She had never mentioned it to her husband since he and she came to a certain understanding on their wedding-day, and her husband had scrupulously avoided mentioning it to her; which reticence on his part was odd and uncomfortable rather than considerate and delicate, inasmuch as she was intensely anxious to pursue the line of conduct that she had laid down for herself in her relations with him—to have no secrets and to tell the truth—and to bring their companionship into such harmony and sympathy as the nature of things made possible.
And since her return she had never even suggested the existence of her lost lover to any of those who might have given her information about him—not even to Beatrice. She "would not recognise that she felt" any interest in his existence.
Nevertheless, she lived in a perpetual, absorbing, all-pervading consciousness that he and she were "in the world together," and that the key to the whole system of the universe lay somehow in that fact.
And the years and months, and days and hours were all dates in the first place, and periods of time in the second; and every date was a register of ineffaceable memories of him, which she could not destroy or ignore.
So on this great anniversary, as the hour approached which witnessed their last interview in the solitude of the half-built house (the boudoir was in the hands of the decorators now, and the sacred spot of floor was covered over with inlaid woodwork), she tried to put the thought of it out of her mind—tried to shut her eyes to the inevitable agonising and tantalising perception of what might have been—and yet was acutely responsive to every tick of the clock on her mantelpiece, checking off the reminiscent moments one by one. She followed the events of that long-ago happy night perforce as an unquiet spirit "raised" against its will.
"Now we were sitting together," she remembered, as the little clock struck nine silvery notes. "We were looking at the moonlight on the bay. Ah, me, how lovely that moonlight was!"
"Rachel," called her husband from his dressing-room within, whither he had just arrived from a dinner at the club, "aren't you dressed yet? I met that young woman of yours on the stairs; she seems to have more time on her hands than she knows what to do with. Why don't you make her wait on you better? She ought to be getting you ready by this time."