"So you're going to play again?"
"Well, of course. It was a tight match."
Jane rose from the table to go and make out the linen for the laundry. Fanny sat staring at the tea leaves in the bottom of her cup. Hannah inquired in her gentle voice if any one wanted the last piece of bread and butter.
II
It was a closer observation than she knew when Jane said that Julius Liddiard came to Bridnorth to be alone.
He was a lonely man. There is that condition of loneliness more insuperable than others, the loneliness of mind in a body surrounded by the evidences of companionship. In this condition he suffered, unable to explain, unable to express.
Much as he loved it, in his own home at times he felt a stranger, whose presence within its walls was largely upon sufferance. Mastery, he claimed, exacting the purpose of his will, but in the very consciousness that it must be forced upon those about him, he felt his loneliness the more.
Authority was not his conception of a home. He had looked for unity, but could not find it. His wife and her sister who lived with them, the frequent visits of their friends and relations, these were the evidences of a companionship that served merely to drive him further and deeper into the lonely companionship of himself.
She had her right to life, he was forced in common justice to tell himself, and if she chose the transitory gayeties, finding more substance of life in a late night in London than an early morning on Somersetshire downs, that was her view of things to which she was fully entitled.
Of his own accord, he had invited her sister to live with them, seeking to please her; hoping to please himself. She made her home there. It was too late actually to turn her away when he had discovered the habit of her life was an incurable laziness which fretted and jarred against the energies of his mind.