When he reached the house he went into the drawing-room and found her sitting there in a cool dress, a book upon her knee. She did not see him as he entered quietly and he stood for some moments in the doorway looking at her.
She had been crying; her cheeks were white and her eyelids heavy; but though this perception came to him with a blow of feeling, it did not, for the moment, move him from his contemplation of her, with all that it brought of new and strange to the familiar.
She was strange, though she was not a stranger, as he had become to himself. He noted the black curves of her hair, the ample line of her bosom, the gentle, white maternal hand laid along the book. On a cabinet, above her head, he saw that she had very beautifully arranged the white, rose and yellow carnations. It was like her to do this justice to her rival’s gift; like her to place them there not only faithfully but beautifully. And as she sat, unaware of him, in the luminous evening air, he felt her to be full of enchantment and this enchantment to centre in the hand laid along the book. His eyes fixed themselves on the hand. It seemed a symbol of the Marian of grace and girlhood whom he had loved with such ardent presage of eternal faith, and of this Marian sitting quietly in her saddened and accepted life, not changed except in so far as she was yet more worthy of fidelity. He saw that she had passed through her ordeal and transcended it; he saw that she would never again show him jealousy; and he saw that as the old Marian he had, perhaps, forever lost her. A lover must always show jealousy. This was a wife, maternal and aloof.
He came into the room and she looked round at him. Her eyes, altered by weeping, were mild and alien. They were without hostility, without accusation; deliberating, gentle; the eyes of a wife. “Did you have a nice afternoon?” she asked laying down her book. “It’s been delicious, hasn’t it?”
Quite as irrevocably as Mrs. Dallas she made the world that he must enter. She, too, in her different way, a way founded on acceptance rather than rejection, showed him compromise and continuity. And nothing that Mrs. Dallas had said to him cut into him so horribly as to see Marian show him this new world.
An impulse came to fall on his knees beside her, bury his head in her lap, and pour out all his griefs. But already, and for Marian’s sake, now, he had learned a better wisdom. To fall and weep and confess would be, again, to act like one of his own heroes; and Marian, in her heart, knew all that there was to know of that old Rupert. He must make her now know, and make himself know, a new Rupert.
He sat down opposite her and, smiling a little, he said, “Mrs. Dallas has done with me.”
“Done with you!” Marian repeated. Her faint colour rose.
“Quite,” said Rupert, nodding; “in any way I’d thought she had me.”
“Do you mean,” said Marian, after a moment, “that she’s been horrid to you?”