"She was called Margaret—Margaret Dance. There is no reason why you should not have it in full."
"Is there a portrait of her?"
"Yes; as a girl she sat to Kneller—a Dryad leaning against an oak.
The picture hangs in my dressing-room."
"It should have hung, rather, in Dicky's nursery; which," she added, picking up and using the weapon she most disliked, "need not have debarred your seeing it from time to time."
He glanced up, for he had never before heard her speak thus sharply.
"Perhaps you are right," he agreed; "though, for me, I let the dead bury
the dead. I have no belief, remember, in any life beyond this one.
Margaret is gone, and I see not how, being dead, she can advantage me or
Dicky."
His words angered Ruth and at the same time subtly pleased her; and on second thoughts angered her the more for having pleased. She thought scorn of herself for her momentary jealousy of the dead; scorn for having felt relief at his careless tone; and some scorn to be soothed by a doctrine that, in her heart, she knew to be false.
For the moment her passions were like clouds in thunder weather, mounting against the wind; and in the small tumult of them she let jealousy dart its last lightning tongue.
"I am not learned in these matters, my lord. But I have heard that man must make a deity of something. The worse sort of unbeliever, they say, lives in the present and burns incense to himself. The better sort, having no future to believe in, idolises his past."
"Margaret is dead," he repeated. "I am no sentimentalist."