After this first visit, he saw her each day for longer intervals, and realized very quickly that she had no intention of shunning him or punishing him before the world, as he had feared that she would do. She was so quiet, so gentle to him, that, with all a man's obtuseness where women are concerned, he congratulated himself on being let off so easily, and thought that the matter was to be buried in oblivion. He even wondered a little at Nan's savoir-faire, and felt a vague sense of disappointment mingling with his relief. Was he to hear no more about it, although she had been struck down and brought almost to death's door by the discovery of his wretched story?
It seemed to be so, indeed. For some time he was kept in continual suspense, expecting her to speak to him on the subject; but he waited in vain. Then, with great reluctance, he himself made some slight approach, some slight reference to it; a reference so slight that if, as he sometimes fancied, her illness had destroyed her memory of the conversation which she had overheard in the study, he need not betray himself. But there was no trace of lack of memory in Nan's face, when he brought out the words which he hoped would lead to some fuller understanding between them. She turned scarlet and then white as snow. Turning her face aside, she said, in a low but very distinct voice,
"I want to hear no more about it, Sydney."
"But, Nan——"
"Please say no more," she interrupted. And something in her tone made him keep silence. He looked at her for a minute or two, but she would not look at him and so he got up and left her, with a sense of mingled injury and defeat.
No, she had not forgotten: she was not oblivious; and he doubted whether she had forgiven him as he thought. The prohibition to speak on the subject chafed him, although he had previously said to himself that it was next to impossible for him to mention it to her. And he was puzzled, for he had not followed the workings of Nan's mind in the least, and the words, concerning his marriage with her and his reasons for it had slipped past him unheeded, while his thoughts were fixed upon other things.
CHAPTER XL.
"WHO WITH REPENTANCE IS NOT SATISFIED—."
Before the summer came, Mrs. Sydney Campion was well enough to drive out in an open carriage, and entertain visitors; but it was painfully apparent to her friends that her health had received a shock from which it had not by any means recovered. She grew better up to a certain point, and there she seemed to stay. She had lost all interest in life. Day after day, when Sydney came home, he would find her sitting or lying on a sofa, white and still, with book or work dropped idly in her lap, her dark eyes full of an unspoken sorrow, her mouth drooping in mournful curves, her thin cheek laid against a slender hand, where the veins looked strangely blue through the delicate whiteness of the flesh. But she never complained. When her husband brought her flowers and presents, as he still liked to do, she took them gently, and thanked him; but he noticed that she laid them aside and seldom looked at them again. The spirit seemed to have gone out of her. And in his own heart Sydney raged and fretted—for why, he said to himself, should she not be like other women?—why, if she had a grudge against him, should she not tell him so? She might reproach him as bitterly as she pleased; the storm would spend itself in time and break in sunshine; but this terrible silence was like a nightmare about them both! He wished that he had the courage to break through it, but he was experiencing the truth of the saying that conscience makes cowards of us all, and he dared not break the silence that she had imposed.