She smiles at him, and holds out her arm, that he may refasten the eighth button of her glove that has mysteriously come undone. He rather lingers over the doing of it. He is, indeed, strangely awkward, and finds an unaccountable difficulty in inducing the refractory button to go into its proper place.
"Shall we bivouac here for the remainder of the night, or seek our beds?" asks Sir Penthony, impatiently. "I honestly confess the charms of that eldest Miss Millbanks have completely used me up. Too much of a good thing is good for nothing; and she is tall. Do none of the rest of you feel fatigue? I know women's passion for conquest is not easily satiated,"—with a slight sneer—"but at five o'clock in the morning one might surely call a truce."
They agree with him, and separate, even the tardiest guest having disappeared by this time, with a last assurance of how intensely they have enjoyed their evening; though when they reach their chambers a few of them give way to such despair and disappointment as rather gives the lie to their expressions of pleasure.
Poor Molly, in spite of her false gayety,—put on to mask the wounded pride, the new sensation of blankness that fills her with dismay,—flings herself upon her bed and cries away all the remaining hours that rest between her and her maid's morning visit.
"Alas! how easily things go wrong:
A sigh too much or a kiss too long."
For how much less—for the mere suspicion of a kiss—have things gone wrong with her? How meagre is the harvest she has gathered in from all her anticipated pleasure, how poor a fruition has been hers!
Now that she and her lover are irrevocably separated, she remembers, with many pangs of self-reproach, how tender and true and honest he has proved himself in all his dealings with her; and, though she cannot accuse herself of actual active disloyalty toward him, a hidden voice reminds her how lightly and with what persistent carelessness she accepted all his love, and how indifferently she made return.
With the desire to ease the heartache she is enduring, she tries—in vain—to encourage a wrathful feeling toward him, calling to mind how ready he was to believe her false, how easily he flung her off, for what, after all, was but a fancied offense. But the very agony of his face as he did so disarms her, recollecting as she does every change and all the passionate disappointment of it.
Oh that she had repulsed Philip on the instant when first he took her hand, as it had been in her heart to do!—but for the misery he showed that for the moment softened her. Mercy on such occasions is only cruel kindness, so she now thinks,—and has been her own undoing. And besides, what is his misery to hers?