"I will confess," he said, "that I have been surprised, during the last few days, to discover how much you do mean to me, Marcia. Your quicker apprehension, perhaps, finds fault with me, rebels against the too great passivity of my appreciation. You have been the refuge of my life. Perhaps I have accepted too much and given too little. That is what may reasonably happen when there is a disparity in years and vitality as great as exists between us. What seemed to you to be habit, Marcia, is really peace. I have forgotten what I should always have remembered—that you are still young."
Her eyes glistened as she looked at him. A ray of sunshine which found its way through an overhead window was momentarily unkind. The lines under his eyes, the wrinkles in his face, the thinning of his hair, were all a little more apparent. Marcia was conscious of an unworthy, a hateful feeling, a sensation of which she was hideously ashamed. And yet, though her voice shook, there was still self-pity in her heart.
"I am so glad that you came," she said. "I am so glad that you have spoken to me like this. You need have no fear. Those other things were born of just a temperamental fancy. They will pass. Be to me just what you have been. I shall be satisfied."
A cloud passed over the sun. His face was once more in the shadow, and curiously enough her fancy saw him through strangely different eyes. Age seemed to pass, although something of the helpless wistfulness remained. It was the pleading of a boy, the eager hope of a child, of which she suddenly seemed conscious.
"Do you think that you can be happy—as things are, Marcia?" he asked. "Your friend, Mr. Borden, doesn't think so. He came down—he was just a little melodramatic, I think—hoping to incite me to a great sacrifice. I was to play the part of the self-denying hero. I was to give away the thing I loved, for its own sake. I had no fancy for the rôle, Marcia."
"And I should hate you in it, dear," she assured him. "Mr. James Borden will always be a dear friend, but he must learn what every one else in the world has had to learn--a lesson of self-denial. He will find some one else."
"I am not jealous of the man," the Marquis said. "I am jealous of just one thought that his coming may have brought into your brain—one instinct."
"Don't be," she begged. "It will go just as it came. It is part of a woman's nature, I suppose. Every now and then it tortures."
Luncheon was served excellently but without undue haste. They fell to discussing lighter topics.
"You will be interested to hear," he told her, "that my daughter Letitia is engaged to be married to Charles Grantham. I am quite expecting that by Christmas I shall be alone. I find Letitia a charming and dutiful companion," he went on, "but I must confess that I look forward to her marriage with some satisfaction. It has occurred to me that if it suited your work, we might travel for a time, or rather settle down—in Italy, if you prefer it. There is so much there to keep one always occupied. In Florence, for instance, one commences a new education every spring."