Felicia was protesting against this too sweeping defence, when Mr. Merrick interrupted her with “I only beg that in the future you will not whet your consciences on my feelings. Pray consider me, if only slightly.”
Felicia looked, when her father went out, too dejected as a result of this scene of dauntless penance.
“Smile, smile, darling,” Maurice begged, raising her hand to his lips, and feeling like a knight returned to his lady, shrived of misdeed by peril bravely fronted.
“Tell me it really is all over. Tell me that I pleased you—that it was what you would have hoped of me.”
“Yes; you were all that I wished. It is only that I am sorry for him. He is like a hurt child, Maurice.”
“He will forget and forgive in a day or two. We will pet him; make much of him. Can I do anything more to feel that I am fully loved again?”
She leaned her forehead against his arm, tired with a spiritual and bodily fatigue that made her voice dim and slumberous as she answered, “Don’t ever remind me that you were not.”
CHAPTER IX
THE news of Geoffrey’s resignation of office was a tonic to Maurice’s new energy. It spurred him to fuller deserving of such sacrifice. He finished the portrait over which he had been loitering, with a sudden vigour that seemed in its auspicious result to promise more originality than he had ever shown, and in pursuance of the new resolution, he accepted another order—a dull and wealthy old ecclesiastic in a cathedral town—an order, in spite of remunerativeness, that he would certainly have refused a month before, as absolutely clogging to all inspiration.
“I shall have to leave Felicia to you for perhaps over a fortnight,” he said to Mr. Merrick, as, in a hansom they drove to an evening party. Felicia preceded them with the friend at whose house they had dined.