"But they are not human ones, and man is human. Do you think a lonely life quite healthy—mentally healthy, I mean?"
"It should be the healthiest of all lives. It is only in theory that solitude is morbid. If you knew more of the world, Miss Thurwell, you would understand something of its cramping influence upon all independent thought. I am not a pessimist—at least, I try not to be. I do not wish to say that there is more badness than goodness in the world, but there is certainly more littleness than greatness. To live in any manner of society without imbibing a certain form of selfishness is difficult; to do so and to taste the full sweetness of the life that never dies is impossible!"
"But there must be some exceptions!" she said hesitatingly. "If people care for one another, and care for the same things——"
He shook his head.
"People never do care for one another. Life is so full nowadays, there are so many things to care about, that any concentration of the affections is impossible. Love is the derision of the modern world. It has not even the respect one pays to the antique."
For several minutes there was deep silence. A piece of burning wood tumbled off from the log and fell upon the tiles, where it lay with its delicate blue smoke curling upward into the room, laden with the pungent odor of the pine. She moved her feet, and there was the slight rustling of her skirts. No other sound broke the stillness which they both remembered for long afterwards—the stillness before the storm.
Suddenly it came to an end. There was a sound of doors being quickly opened and shut, voices in the hall, and then a light, firm tread, crossing the main portion of the room. They both glanced toward the curtains, and there was a second's expectancy. Then they were thrown on one side with a hasty movement, and a tall dark woman in a long traveling cloak swept through them.
She paused for a moment on the threshold, and her flashing black eyes seemed to take in every detail of the little scene. She saw Helen, fair and comely, with an added beauty in her soft, animated expression, and she saw her companion, his face alight with intelligence and sensibility, and with the glow of a new life in his brilliant eyes. The perfume of the Egyptian tobacco which hung about the room, the tea tray, their two chairs drawn up before the fire—nothing escaped her. It all seemed to increase her wrath.
For she was very angry. Her form was dilated with passion, and her voice, when she spoke, shook with it. But it was not her anger, nor her threatening gestures, before which they both shrank back for a moment, appalled. It was her awful likeness to the murdered Sir Geoffrey Kynaston.
"Helen!" she cried, "they told me of this; but if I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it."