How happy they would have been together. They would have lived together at Hogstead all their lives, a part of the Marston family. Hammerton would have ceased to exist for him. They would have built themselves a cottage on the edge of the estate; their children would have passed their infancy among green fields, within sound of cricket balls.
At the far end of the field, on the southern terrace, Beatrice was sitting alone, watching Rosemary play a few yards away from her. She must have been there during the greater part of the morning, but Roland had not noticed her till she waved a hand to attract his attention. He rose at once and walked across to her. He felt that a talk with her would do him good.
They had seen a good deal of each other intermittently during the past three years, and each talk with her had been for Roland a step farther into the heart of a mystery. Gradually they had come to talk in shorthand, to read each other’s thoughts without need of the accepted medium of words, so that when in reply to a complimentary remark about the fascination of her hat she made a quiet shrug of her shoulders, he knew that it was prompted by the wound of her wasted beauty. And on that late summer morning, with its solemn warning of decay, Roland felt brave enough to put to her the question that he had long wished to ask.
“Why did you marry him?” he said.
His question necessitated no break in the rhythm of her reverie. She answered him without pausing.
“I didn’t know my own mind,” she said. “I was very young. I wasn’t in love with anyone else. My mother was keen on it. I gave way.”
Beatrice spoke the truth. Her mother had honestly believed the match to be to her daughter’s advantage. Her own life had been made difficult through lack of money. She had always been worried by it, and she had naturally come to regard money as more important than the brief fluttering of emotion that had been the prelude to the long, bitter struggle. It had seemed to her a wonderful thing that her daughter should marry this rich man. Herself had only been unhappy because she had been poor; her daughter would be always rich.
“How did you meet him?” Roland asked.
“I was his secretary. Romantic, isn’t it? The poor girl marries the rich employer. Quite like the story books.” And her hands fluttered at her sides.
Roland sought for some word of sympathy, but he was too appalled by the cruel waste of this young woman’s beauty, of her enormous potentialities flung away on an ageing, withered man, who could not appreciate them. Her next sentence held for him the force of a prophetic utterance.