“Well, Peter, that is hardly necessary. I shall go up to London within the week. Lady Mainwaring asked me to go to Paris with her on the 20th. She stops in London for three days. I shall see Mr. Apswith there, get my trousseau in Paris, and be married in July, in about six weeks’ time. Delay would be rather silly—he has waited so long.”
“You take my breath away, Mary. I am selfish, I own. I don’t like to lose you.”
“It isn’t losing me, Peter dear. We shall see a lot of one another. I shall be married from here, of course. Mr. Apswith will stop with the Mainwarings.”
When Mary left him, Peter resumed his seat, and even went on writing for a few moments. Then he put down the pen and stretched himself, as one does when summoning courage. He did not lack courage, yet he owned to himself that Mary’s prospective departure sickened him. Her grave, even character had given him a sense of supporting sympathy; he needed a sympathetic atmosphere; and Alicia’s influence was a very air-pump. Poor Alicia, thought Odd. The sense of his own despair struck him as rather unmanly. He looked out of the open window at the lawn, its cool, green stretches whitened with the dew; the rooks were cawing in the trees, and his thoughts went back suddenly to a certain morning in London, not two months ago, just after the baby’s death and just before Alicia’s departure for the Riviera.
Alicia was lying on the sofa—Peter staring at the distant trees, did not see them but that scene—her magnificent health had made lying on sofas very uncharacteristic, and Odd had been struck with a gentle sort of compunction at the sight of the bronze head on the pillow, the thin white cheek. His heart was very heavy. The paternal instincts are not said to be strong; Odd had not credited himself with possessing them in any elevated form. Yet, now that the poor baby was dead, he realized how keen had been his interest in the little face, how keen the half-animal pleasure in the clinging of the tiny fingers, and as he looked at the baby in its small white coffin, he had realized, too, with a pang of longing that the little white face, like a flower among the flowers about it, was that of his child—dead.
On that morning he bent over Alicia with something of the lover’s tenderness in his heart, though Alicia had very nearly wrung all tenderness out of it.
“My dear girl, my poor, dear girl,” he said, kissing her; and he sat down beside her on the sofa and smoothed back her hair. Alicia looked up at him with those wonderful eyes—looked up with a smile.
“Oh, I shall be all right soon enough, Peter.”
Peter put his arm under her head and looked hard at her—her beauty entranced him as it had done from the beginning.
“Alicia, Alicia, do you love me?” His earnestness pleased her; she felt in it her own power.