"Well, I don't like it."
"Then you should have married him, and left Eugene to do the drowning."
"Do you know, Sir Roderick, I rather doubt if Eugene would have drowned himself?"
"I don't know; he has very good manners."
They both laughed.
"But all the same, I am unhappy about Mr. Stafford."
"Ah, your notions of other people's morality are too exalted. I don't accept responsibility for Stafford. He would not have followed my suggestion unless the idea had been in germ in his own mind."
Claudia's pre-occupation with Stafford's fate would have been somewhat disturbing to a lover less philosophical or less sympathetic than Eugene. As it was, he was pleased with her concern, and his sorrow for the trouble it occasioned her was mitigated by a conviction that its effect would not be permanent. In this idea he proved perfectly correct. As the weeks passed by and nothing was heard of the vanished man, his place in the lives of those who had been so intimately associated with him became filled with other interests, and from a living presence he dwindled to an occasional memory. It was as if he had really died. His name was now and then mentioned with the sad affection we accord to those who have gone before us; for the most part the thought of him was thrust out in the busy give-and-take of everyday life. Save for the absence of that bitter sense of hopelessness which the separation of death brings, Stafford might as well have passed on the road which, but for Ayre's intervention, he had marked out for himself. Claudia and Eugene were wrapped up in one another; their love tor him, though not dead, was dormant, and his name was oftener upon the lips of Ayre and Morewood than of those who had been most closely united with him in the bonds of common experience. But Ayre and Morewood, besides entertaining a kindly memory of his personal charm, found delight in studying him as a problem. They were keenly interested in the upshot of his new start in life, and their blunter perceptions were deaf to the dissonance between the ideal he had set before himself and the alternative Ayre had suggested for his adoption. Perhaps they were right. If none but saints may do the work of the world, much of its most useful work must go undone.
Haddington and Kate Bernard were married before Christmas. Claudia deprecated such haste; and Eugene willingly acquiesced in her wish to put off the date of their own union. He thought that being engaged to Claudia was a pleasant state of existence, and why hasten to change it? Besides, as he suggested, they were not people of fickle mind, like Kate and Haddington (for, of course, Claudia had told him of Haddington's proposal to herself—it is believed ladies always do tell these incidents), and could afford to wait. Eugene went to the wedding. He was strongly opposed to such foolish things as standing quarrels, and Kate was entirely charming in the capacity of somebody else's wife: it is a comparatively easy part to fill, and he had no fault to find with her conception of it. The magnificence of his wedding present smoothed his return to favor, and Kate had the good sense to accept the rôle he offered her, and allowed it to be supposed that she had been the faithless, he the forsaken, one; whereas in reality, as Ayre remarked, she had herself doubled the parts. Claudia judiciously avoided the question of her presence at the ceremony by a timely absence from London, and enjoyed only at second-hand the amusement Eugene derived from Haddington's hesitation between triumph over his supposed rival, and doubt, which had in reality gained the better part. In spite of this doubt, it is allowable to hope for a very fair share of working happiness in the Haddington household. Kate was hardly a woman to make a man happy; but, on the other hand, she would not prevent him being happy if his bent lay in that direction. And Haddington was too entirely contented with himself to be other than happy.
Eugene's wedding was fixed for the Easter recess, and among the party gathered for the occasion at Millstead were most of those who had been his guests in the previous summer. The Haddingtons were not there—Kate retorted Claudia's evasion; and of course Stafford's figure was missing; but the Territon brothers were there, and Morewood and Ayre, the former bringing with him the completed picture, which was Rickmansworth's present to his sister. The party was to be enlarged the day before, the wedding by a large company of relations of both their houses.