“Not in the least, though it felt horrid. She merely let me see that I’d been mistaken.”
“Mistaken? In what way?”
“In almost every way. In my ideas about myself, and about life, and about her.—It wasn’t, for one thing, me she liked in particular, at all. It was you.”
Marian’s flush had deepened. “She seemed to like you very much indeed.”
“Only frivolously; not seriously. She showed me to-day how silly I’d been to think it anything but frivolous. She made me see that I’d been a serious ass.”
Marian sat looking at him. She was startled, and on his behalf—wonderful maternal instinct!—she was angry; yet—he saw it all in the sweet, subtle alteration of her face—she was happy, half incredulously yet marvelously happy. And as he saw her happiness, tears came to Rupert’s eyes and he felt himself, deeply and inarticulately, blessing Mrs. Dallas. She had been right. This was something “even better.”
“She’s an exceedingly clever woman,” he said, smiling at Marian, though she must see the tears. “And an exceedingly first-rate woman, too. And I’ll always be grateful to her. The question is,”—he got up and came and stood over his wife,—“I’ve been such an ass, darling. Can you forgive me?”
He had found her hand as he questioned her and he held it now up to his cheek closing his eyes, how differently!
IV
MRS. DALLAS, after her young friend had left her, sat on for quite a long while on the veranda. The concentration of her recent enterprise effaced itself from her eyes and lips. Her glance, steeping itself again in indolent and melancholy retrospects, fell into a reverie. Once or twice, putting up a languid hand, she yawned.