He gave a very slight start as his eyes fell upon Margaret, but betrayed no other sign of surprise. Tiny flew to him at once, dragged at his hand, and effected some sort of informal introduction, mingled with an account of the accident which had happened to Julian.
"Don't you want to go and ascertain the amount of the injury?" said Margaret, with a little smile.
"Not at all," said Wyvis, emphatically, and took up his position by the mantel-piece, whence he got the best view of her graceful figure and flower-like face. Margaret felt the gaze and was not displeased by it, admiration was no new thing to her; she smiled vaguely and slightly lowered her lovely eyes. And Wyvis stood and looked.
In spite of his apparent roughness Wyvis Brand was an impressionable man. He had come into the room cold, tired, not quite in his usual health, and more than usually out of humor; and instead of the ordinary sight of Janetta—a trim, pleasant, household-fairy sort of sight, it was true, but not of the wildly exciting kind—he found a vision, as it seemed to him, of the most ethereal beauty—a woman whose every movement was full of grace, whose exquisitely modulated voice expressed refinement as clearly as her delicately moulded features; whose whole being seemed to exhale a sort of perfume of culture, as if she were in herself the most perfect product of a whole civilization.
Wyvis had been in many drawing-rooms and known many women, more or less intimately, but he had never, in all his purposeless Bohemian life, come across exactly this type of woman—a type in which refinement counts for more than beauty, culture for more than grace. With a sudden leap of memory, he recalled some scenes of which he had been witness years before, when a woman, hot, red, excited with wine and with furious jealousy, had reviled him in the coarsest terms, had struck him in the face and had spat out foul and vindictive words of abuse. That woman—ah, that woman was his wife—had been for many years to him the type of what women must always be when stripped of the veneer of society's restraints. Janetta had of late shaken his conviction on this point; it was reserved for Margaret Adair to shatter it to the winds.
She looked so fair, so dainty, so delicate—he would have been a marvel amongst men who believed that her body was anything but "an index to a most fair mind"—that Wyvis said to himself that he had never seen any woman like her. He was fascinated and enthralled. The qualities which made her so different from his timid, underbred, melancholy mother, or his coarse and self-indulgent wife, were those in which Margaret showed peculiar excellence. And before these—for the first time in his life—Wyvis Brand fell down and worshipped.
It was unfortunate; it was wrong; but it was one of those things that will happen sometimes in everyday life. Wyvis was separated from his wife, and hated as much as he despised her. Almost without knowing what he did, he laid his whole heart and soul, suddenly and unthinkingly, at Margaret's feet. And Margaret, smiling and serene, utterly ignorant of his past, and not averse to a little romance that might end more flatteringly than Sir Philip's attentions had done, was quite ready to accept the gift.
Before Janetta had bound up Julian's hand, and made some fresh tea, which she was obliged to carry upstairs herself, Mr. Brand had obtained information from Margaret as to the day and hour on which she was likely to come to Janetta for her singing-lesson, and also as to several of her habits in the matter of walks and drives. Margaret gave the information innocently enough; Wyvis had no direct purpose in extracting it; but the attraction which the two felt towards each other was sufficient to make such knowledge of her movements undesirable, and even dangerous for both.