'I'm afraid I can't gratify you, Aunt Julia. I certainly can't ask Gerald to wait for a year.'
'My dear, why not!' Aunt Julia did not repress.
Althea went on calmly. 'It is true, of course, that we are not in love like two children, with no thought of responsibility or larger claims. You see, one outgrows that rather naïve American idea about marriage. Mine is, if you like, a mariage de convenance, in the sense that Gerald is a poor man and cannot marry unless he marries money. And I am proud to have the power to help him to build up a large and dignified life, and we don't intend to postpone our marriage when we know, trust, and love each other as we do.'
'A large life, my dear,' said Aunt Julia. 'Don't deceive yourself into thinking that. One needs a far larger fortune than your tiny one, nowadays, if one is to build up a large life. What I fear more than anything is that you don't in the least realise what English country life is all the year round. Imagine, if you can, your winters here.'
'I shan't spend many winters here,' said Althea smiling. She did not divulge her vague, bright plans to Aunt Julia, but they filled the future for her; she saw the London drawing-room where, when Gerald was in Parliament, she would gather delightful people together. Among such people, Lady Blair, Miss Buckston, her friends in Devonshire, and of Grimshaw Rectory, seemed hardly more than onlookers; they did not fit into the pictures of her new life.
And if they did not fit, what of Franklin? Even in old unsophisticated pictures of a salon he had been a figure adjusted with some difficulty. It had, in days that seemed immeasurably remote—days when she had wondered whether she could marry Franklin—it had been difficult to see herself introducing him with any sense of achievement to Lady Blair or to the Collings, and she knew now, clearly, why: in Lady Blair's drawing-room, as in Devonshire and at Grimshaw Rectory, Franklin would have looked a funny little man. How much more funny in the new setting. What would he do in it? What was it to mean to him? What would any setting mean to Franklin in which he was to see her as no longer needing him? For, and this was the worst of it, and in spite of happiness Althea felt it as a pang indeed, she no longer needed Franklin; and knowing this she longed at once to avoid and to atone to him.
She found him after her walk with Aunt Julia sitting behind a newspaper in the library. Franklin always read the newspapers every morning, and it struck Althea as particularly touching that this good habit should be persevered in under his present circumstances. She was so much touched by Franklin, the habit of old intimacy was so strong, that her own essential change of heart seemed effaced by the uprising of feeling for him. 'O Franklin!' she said. He had risen as she entered, and he stood looking at her with a smile. It seemed to receive her, to forgive, to understand. Almost weeping, she went to him with outstretched hands, faltering, 'I am so happy, and I am so sorry, dear Franklin. Oh, forgive me if I have hurt your life.'
He looked at her, no longer smiling, very gravely, holding her hands, and she knew that he was not thinking of his life, but of hers. And, with a further pang, she remembered that the last time they had stood so—she and Franklin—she had given him more hope for his life than ever before in all their histories. He must remember, too, and he must feel her unworthy in remembering, and even though she did not need Franklin, she could not bear him to think her unworthy. 'Forgive me,' she repeated. And the tears rose to her eyes. 'I've been so tossed, so unstable. I haven't known. I only know now, you see, dear Franklin. I've really fallen in love at last. Can you ever forgive me?'
'For not having fallen in love with me?' he asked gently.
'No, dear,' she answered, forced into complete sincerity. What was it in Franklin that compelled sincerity, and made it so easy to be sincere? There, at least, was a quality for which one would always need him. 'No, not for that, but for having thought that I might, perhaps, fall in love with you. It is the hope I gave you that must make this seem so sudden and so cruel.'