For a moment they looked at each other. The man's eyes were cold and contemptuous, and the woman's sense of injury and injustice increased till she felt wellnigh desperate. To think that she should have been dragged home like a naughty little girl from a party, who must be sent to bed as a punishment, while everyone else was still dancing and enjoying the ball!--and Mr. Kennard would have found another partner whose husband was not a monster of unreasonable jealousy. Perhaps he would smile and shrug his shoulders, and cease now to send her violets every morning, and no longer single her out for special attention, or send her little notes asking what were her plans for the afternoon--or give her books with quotations inscribed by himself on the flyleaf: quotations conveying a harmless though flattering homage. In short, all the little inarticulate attentions that to the initiated are but the preliminaries to a game that need be no more than an emotional pastime, but may be fraught with peril to the flattered novitiate.
Instinctively her hand rested on a small, beautifully bound volume that had come this morning with the violets she wore, whose perfume stirred her senses even at this moment as it floated out into the room. On the title page was traced in Kennard's peculiar writing:
"A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou Beside me, singing in the wilderness-- Oh! wilderness were paradise enow."
"Aren't you going to explain?" she demanded in a stifled voice. "You have made me the laughing-stock of the station. You have spoilt my evening. Do you expect me to submit without a word? I am not a child, let me tell you; I am capable of taking care of myself."
"Apparently that is just what you are not capable of doing," said Coventry. "Unless you promise me to behave decently in future, and unless you do so, I shall send you home to your father until my time is up in India."
A sudden remembrance of the shabby vicarage assailed her, and the dull little village, and the routine of housework, and economy; Sunday school, choir practice, parish duties, old people, the long dark winters, and the cold, and the rain, and the solitude. It chilled her spirit, and filled her with a sickening dread. Yet how could she bring herself to promise "to behave with decency," when, in her own opinion, she had done nothing reprehensible? Her "friendship" with Mr. Kennard was blameless on both sides. It might be true that he did not bear the best of characters; Mrs. Greaves had warned her, most officiously, of that, and had cited one or two so-called scandals in which he had been concerned, to all appearances, discreditably. But had he not told her himself, repeatedly, that it had all been the fault of the women, which she could quite believe, and that her influence on his life was the one good thing that had ever come his way? Had he not declared that for her sweet sake there should be no more "stories," that because of her he would be strong? Surely that was something to be proud of! Therefore, how could she turn and treat him as though he were a blackguard, and deny him the first incentive he had ever known to rectitude of life? Why, every Sunday lately he had gone to church at her behest, and he said he had given up gambling at the club, assured her that every night he read a chapter of the Bible she had lent him--a worn little volume that had been hers since childhood, with notes in the margins, and flowers pressed between the pages to mark the anniversaries of her life's rare events--her mother's death, her confirmation, her first communion, and her marriage.
"Well?" Her husband's voice cut sharply through her thoughts.
Now she gazed at him with large, distressed blue eyes.
"Oh, George, do try to understand! There is really nothing wrong. We are only friends, and he needs my friendship; it helps him, it does him good."
Rage and disgust almost choked him. "Bah!" he exclaimed furiously, "don't talk rot like that to me." He took a step forward, and seized her wrist. "Can you swear to me that the beast has never attempted to make love to you? Can you deny that he follows you about, and writes you notes, and gives you presents, and that you have never tried to stop him? The fellow is notorious, and only a man who was a fool or a blackguard would stand by and see his wife go to the devil with him or with anyone else."