“Alice, there is nothing to be gained by referring to the past, nothing but pain. My past is dead and buried; the sooner you put yours under the ground the better. Never allude to our married life again. Let it be as though it had never been; it was a fiasco, a MISTAKE! We have only to deal with the present and the future.”
“The present and the future,” she echoed, choking back her tears.
The sound of their horses’ hoofs on the soft springy turf was the only sound that broke the silence for more than ten minutes. Presently she said:
“What is your future?—what are you going to do?”
“I mean to have a look at Looton, a winter’s hunting in the shires, and to return to India in the spring.”
“To India!” she gasped. “Reginald, does it ever, ever strike you how cruel you are to me?”
“Cruel!” he echoed, looking into her wistful beautiful eyes with stern self-command. “God help you, Alice, if I was ever as cruel to you as you have been to me. Come,” he added, putting his horse into a canter, “here is the lane to the Manister road; we had better get on.”
Somehow, Alice’s attempts at explanation or reconciliation were always failures. Her husband declined to meet her halfway. He looked so cold and so unsympathetic that the words that came trembling to her lips died away unspoken, frozen into silence by the icy chilliness of his demeanour. Firm and intrepid resolutions she had made to brave him came to nothing when she found herself alone with him face to face. He would talk on any other topic but themselves—their past. He cantered up the lane in front of her without even turning his head. Had he glanced backwards, he would have seen what would have surprised him considerably—Alice hastily searching in the saddle-pocket for her handkerchief and furtively wiping away some distinctly visible tears.
The long grass lane terminated in a locked gate—a gate opening on the Manister road—over which Cardigan showed the way in gallant style, closely followed by the bay and blue habit.
“Oh how pretty! How easy it looks!” exclaimed Mary Ferrars, as she and Geoffrey trotted up just in time to witness the performance.