“Half the place will be there!” said Diana, with an unnatural laugh. “You know we always turn up to see the last of any one, it’s one of the few little distractions left us. Of course I shall go—Chum won’t mind.”
“I never argue,” said Churton, the cigar between his teeth making the words sound ominously as if he had set them. “All I have to say is that if I were you—I shouldn’t go.”
For a minute she looked up sharply, and her heart throbbed with fear of him. He was standing at his full height, and though she was not a small woman, he made her feel suddenly that his masculine strength might be brutal—in any case that she was but a child to him, physically. Then with the old sore sense of injustice that has rankled in woman from all generations, she set his sins beside her own, and demanded dumbly if he could throw the first stone, even though he knew! He did not guess, of course—she would not harbour that idea; but even if he did he had no right to accuse her. She shut her lips in a hard line, and said no more.
Churton looked at her also for a moment. He saw the hard, sun-scorched face and the embittered lips, and perhaps he thought of the red-haired girl he married. Diana was never untidy—her head was as sleek and well-groomed now as a racer’s coat, and below the collar-line her neck was milk-white where her evening dress betrayed its original beauty. She had the transparency peculiar to red-haired women, and there was neither flaw nor fleck on her shoulders.
They went up to bed in silence, and the peace between them remained unbroken. She could hear him moving about in his dressing-room for a while, but she was undressed and asleep before he lay down by her side, and she was unaware that he lay hour after hour, awake and thinking, piecing one thing in with another, proving his own dishonour, and unconsciously
“Nursing his wrath to keep it warm.”
He thought himself cool and collected, while the smouldering fury in him burned steadily to white heat. He had always been afraid of his own temper—it was cheating him now.
Diana woke early, for she had fallen asleep wishing to do so, and thinking that her husband was still oblivious of her she slipped out of bed and began to do her hair rapidly. She glanced at him once, and saw that he was lying on his back as he often did, the covering sheet thrown off him, and one perfectly-moulded knee drawn up, which was also a habit of his. He would sleep so, and she thought his eyes were closed now without more than a cursory glance. He was, in fact, not much in her thoughts, though again it flitted across her mind that his large supine limbs suggested terrible strength. He was a splendidly-built man—as well built as Alaric Lewin, though his added years had thickened him somewhat—and even the raised knee was rounded with a massive beauty that would have pleased a sculptor.
By and by she found that the linen gown she wanted hung in a closet outside her room, on the other side of the passage. She slipped out almost noiselessly to get it, and as she returned she heard a clock somewhere in the house strike four. She was in plenty of time, but the last report of the Greville’s departure which had reached her had been stated at five, and the grooms must saddle up for her at once. She did not wait to telephone to the Lewins after all, for fear of hindering herself rather than otherwise. The thought occupied her mind, so that when she re-entered the room she did not notice that her husband had gone.
There was no time for a bath now, she could have that later when she had ridden up the hill again, and was dusty and hot. Ally would be gone then—gone at least for a month, for no one expected the trouble in East Africa to last longer. A month was long enough—a month without Ally! She did not realise that she had grown a foolish woman, whose empty heart could not feed for ever on passing attractions, and so craved greedily to really fill itself, though with an unsatisfying love. Alaric Lewin had been like a renewal of youth and its possibilities; he was young and vital, and his very lack of purpose made him seem like a boy far into his manhood. She was clinging to the thought of him, when she saw her husband enter quietly from the dressing-room.