"Allida, darling," said Haldicott—he went to her and took both her hands, so that she must raise her head and look at him—"if I've made fun of you when I was feeling horribly frightened, and called you ridiculous when I found you as tragic and adorable as you were grotesque, that was the rope. Now I will take an hour, or a day, or a whole week, if necessary, to make you believe it; but I could have committed suicide—I assure you I could—when I saw Oliver Ainslie come into the room."
A FORSAKEN TEMPLE
CHAPTER I
MILLY
"It is the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack of response and understanding," said Milly. "It is as if I were always looking at a face that never really saw me or spoke to me. Such a mistake as I have made—or as others have made for me—is irretrievable. An unhappy marriage seems to ruin everything in you and about you, and you have to go on living among the ruins. You can't go away and leave them behind you, as you can other calamities in life."
Milly Quentyn and Mrs. Drent were alone this afternoon in the country-house where they had come really to know each other, and Milly, acting hostess for her absent cousin, had poured out Mrs. Drent's tea and then her own, leaving it untouched, however, while she spoke, her hands falling, clasped together, in her lap, her eyes fixed on vacancy. The contemplation of ruins for the last five years had filled these eyes with a pensive resignation; but they showed no tearful repinings, no fretful restlessness. They were clear eyes, large and luminous, and in looking at them and at the wan, lovely little face where they bloomed like melancholy flowers, Mrs. Drent's face, on the other side of the tea-table, grew yet more sombre and more intent in its brooding sympathy. "Why did you——" she began, and then changed the first intention of her question to—"Why did you—love him?" This was more penetrating than to ask Mrs. Quentyn why she had married him.
The extreme lowness of Mrs. Drent's voice muffled, as it were, its essential harshness; one felt in it the effort to be soft, as in her one felt effort, always, to quell some latent fierceness, an eager, almost savage energy. She was thirty years old, six years older than Milly Quentyn. Her skin was swarthy, her eyes, under broad, tragically bent eyebrows, were impenetrably black. Her features, had they not been so small, so finely finished, would have seemed too emphatic, significant as they were of a race-horse nervousness and of something inflexible in the midst of an expression all flexibility. Her hands were curiously slight and small, and as she now, in looking at her companion and in asking her question, locked them together with a force that made them tremble, they showed the same combination of an excessive strength informing an excessive fragility.
Milly Quentyn's gaze drifted to her and rested upon her in silence.