The hour of departure for the Christmas festivities at Wood Grange came as a relief from the persistent pinpricks of unexplained emotion which tormented him. His wife was young and beautiful, yet he was only conscious of repulsion. He hated her for her trickery. But most he hated her because she had cheated him of the old wife—the friend, the confidante, who had grown to be so much, and so much the best part, in his life. For now there was no confidence between the two—no talk, no reading, no music to brighten the Temple rooms. They lived in an almost complete silence.
Every window of the Grange shone out with yellow light across the snow. For once Christmas had been kind and seasonable—a white sheet covered the world. Holly gleamed against old oak. Priceless silver, saved from the smelting-pot in Cromwell’s hard days, shone above white napery on the long tables. The tenants’ dinner was over, and now was the moment when, according to the will, Michael Wood’s wife must be presented to the tenants then assembled.
The slender figure in white woollen cloth and white fur, with Christmas roses at its breast, stood on the daïs at the end of the great hall, and the tenants cheered themselves hoarse at the mere sight of her beautiful face, her kind eyes.
“It went off very well,” Michael said when, the last guest gone, the last shutter closed, the last servant departed, the two stood alone in the long drawing-room.
“Yes; think if you had had to present to them the old white-haired wife——”
“I loved the old wife,” he said obstinately; but his voice was not quite steady.
“I wish,” she said, playing with the Christmas roses she wore, “I wish you would try to forgive me. It was horribly wrong; but I began it as a joke. You see, I had only just come over from the convent where I was brought up. I thought it would be such fun: I was always good at theatricals. I will never do anything silly again. And to-morrow I’ll go away, and you need never see me again. And you have got the money and the old place, haven’t you? And I got them for you—and—do forgive me. It began as a silly schoolgirl’s joke indeed.”
“But—a convent! You have read and thought——”
“It was my father. He made me read and think; and when he died all the money went, and my mother is poor. Oh, Michael, don’t be so flinty! Say you forgive me before I go! It all began in a joke!”