No, she did not love him any more, she was quite sure of that. She watched his tall, elegant figure—-he was as beautiful as Lucifer—moving about the rooms, and it seemed that his very face had grown ugly to her sight. She shivered to think that once—thank God, only once!—his lips had pressed hers; that she had let him say to her fond words, and write to her fond letters, and had even written back to him others, which, if not exactly love-letters, were of the sort that no girl could write except to a man in whom she wholly believed—in his goodness and in his love for herself.
What had become of those letters she had no idea; what was in them she hardly remembered; but the thought of them made her grow pale and terrible. In an agony of shame, as if all the world were pointing at her—at Dr. Grey's wife—she hid herself in a corner, behind the voluminous presence of Miss Gascoigne, and sat waiting, counting minutes like hours till her husband should appear.
He came at last, his kind face all beaming.
"Christian I have been having a long talk with—But you are very tired." His eye caught—she knew it would at once—the change in her face, "My darling," he whispered, "would you not like to go home!"
"Oh yes, home! Take me home!" Christian replied almost with a sob. She clung to his arm, and passed through the crowd with him. And whether she fully loved him or not, from the very bottom of her soul she thanked God for her husband.
Chapter 9.
"Teach me to feel for others' woes,
To hide the fault I see;
The mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me."
Breakfast was just over on the morning following the soirée at the vice chancellor's. Christian sat with the two aunts, quietly sewing.
Ay, very quietly, even after last night. She had taken counsel with her own heart, through many wakeful hours, and grown calm and still. Neither her husband nor Miss Gascoigne had once named Sir Edwin. Probably Aunt Henrietta did not know him, and in the crowded party Dr. Grey might not have chanced to recognize him. Indeed, most likely the young man would take every means of avoiding recognition from the master of his own college, whence he had been ignominiously dismissed. His appearance at St. Mary's Lodge was strange enough, and only to be accounted for by his having been invited by the vice chancellor's young wife, who knew him only as Sir Edwin Uniacke, the rich young baronet.
But, under shadow of these advantages, no doubt he could easily get into society again, even at Avonsbridge, and would soon be met every where. She might have to meet him—she, who knew what she did know about him, and who, though there had been no absolute engagement between them, had suffered him to address her as a lover for four bright April weeks, ending in that thunderbolt of horror and pain, after which he never came again to the farm-house, and she never heard from or of him one word more.