With return of winter some temporary peace descended upon Myles, and, looking back, he felt ashamed at the storm and stress of spirit that Yeoland's resurrection had awakened in him. For a season, as life returned to its level progress, he truly told himself that he viewed the friendship between his wife and her old lover without concern, because it was natural and inevitable. Honor's very frankness and ingenuous pleasure in the wanderer's company shamed a jealous attitude. Some men, indeed, had gone further and blessed Yeoland's home-coming. Certainly that event was in no small measure responsible for Honor's renewed physical welfare, and the excitement acted kindly upon a temperament that found food in novelty and desired sweep and play of change for her soul's health. Stapledon's wife was well again, and soon she discovered that life could still be full and sweet. Into a sort of lulled contentment he therefore sank, and proclaimed to himself that all was well, that the existence of the three, lived under present relations, was natural and seemly. He checked impatience at the expeditions planned, listened to Christopher's endless designs with respect to Godleigh, advised him and endured from him the old, extravagant conceits and jesting, specious views of life. Yet the glamour was off them now, and they only wearied Myles. He believed at first that Yeoland must be a changed man; but very soon he found no such thing had happened.
Nevertheless, some parity of tastes obtained, as of old, in divers directions. Again they walked for many miles together, each occupied with Nature from his own standpoint; and again they met in the dawn hour that possessed like fascination for both. At such times, under grey winter light, shrewd and searching, what was best in the men stood first, and they almost understood one another; but when they met, smudged by long hours of the toilsome day, and especially when they found each other in common company of Honor, both lacked the former sympathy.
As for Christopher, he heartily appreciated Myles at this period, and found the farmer's common sense a valuable antidote to the somewhat too spacious ideas of Doctor Clack in matters concerning betterment of Godleigh. And not seldom did Yeoland rejoice, with a single eye, that his old love had such a steadfast rock upon which to establish her life.
In his relations with Honor he had been a little astonished to find the fact of her marriage not recognised by his nature, as it was by his conscience. That Nature could dare to be herself surprised him, when her wave throbbed through his being now and again upon some rare, sweet note of voice or tinkle of laughter. At such emotional moments he complimented the character and heroic attributes of Myles, with a vigour so crude that Honor might have suspected had not she echoed the sentiment from her heart. She never wearied of her husband's praises, and had no discernment as to what prompted Christopher's sudden overflowings of admiration. The man's return, as in the first instance of his own juxtaposition with Myles, served to alter Honor's inner attitude towards her husband. It seemed, in a sense, as she had fancied of old, that these two were the complement each of the other.
And a result was that his wife became more to Stapledon as the weeks passed. Gradually—but not so gradually that he failed to observe it—there came an increase of consideration in small matters, a new softness in her voice, a deeper warmth in her kisses. He marked her added joy in life, noted how she let her happiness bubble over to make him more joyful; and at first he was filled with satisfaction; and next he was overclouded with doubt. He tried to ascertain why her old lover's return should increase Honor's liking for her husband; he laboured gloomily upon a problem altogether beyond his calibre of mind to solve. He failed to see that the subtle change in his wife extended beyond him to the confines of her little world, that some higher graciousness was bred of it, that the least planet of which she was the sun now reaped new warmth from her accession of happiness. He puzzled his intelligence, and arrived, through long fret and care, at an erroneous solution. Utterly unable to appraise the delicate warp and poise of her humours, or gauge those obscure escapements that control happiness in the machinery of a woman's mind, Stapledon came to pitiful and mistaken conclusions that swept from him all content, all security, all further peace. At the glimmer of some devil's lantern he read into Honor's altered bearing an act of deliberate simulation. He denied that this advent of the other could by any possibility possess force to deepen or widen her affection for him; and he concluded, upon this decision, that the alteration must be apparent, not real. Such was the man's poor speed in the vital science of human nature. Next, he strove to explain the necessity for her pretence, with the reason of it; and so he darkened understanding, fouled his own threshold with fancied danger, and passed gradually into a cloudy region of anxiety and gloom. Excuse for speech or protest there was none; yet, unable to discern in Honor's frank awakening to everyday life and her renewed healthful bearing towards all her environment an obvious purity of mind and thought, he suffered his agitation to conquer him. He lived and waited, and sank into a chronic watchfulness that was loathsome to him. His fits of moody taciturnity saddened his wife and astonished her above measure, for it seemed that the old love of natural things was dead in him. In truth, his religion of the Moor—his dogma of the granite and vast waste places—failed him at this pinch. His gods were powerless and dumb—either that, or the heart of him had grown deaf for a season.
His unrest appeared, but the inner fires were hidden very completely. Then Mark Endicott, who knew that Myles was disordered, and suspected the tissue of his trouble, approached him, burrowed to his secret, and held converse thereon through some hours of a stormy night in January.
Stapledon at first evaded the issue, but he confessed at length, and, when invited to name the exact nature of his disquiet, merely declared the present position to be impossible in his judgment.
"We can't live with the balance so exact," he said. "I feel it and know it. Honor and this man loved one another once, and the natural attraction of their characters may bring them to do so again, now that such a thing would be sin."
"A big word—'sin,'" answered Mr. Endicott. "If that's all your trouble, the sooner you let sunshine into your mind again the better. Honor's an Endicott, when all's said, though maybe one of the strangest ever born under that name. I'm astonished to hear that this is the colour of your mind. And the man—queer though he is, too, and unlike most men I've met with—yet he's not the sort to bring trouble on a woman, last of all this woman."
"You prose on, uncle, not remembering what it felt like to feel your blood run hot at a woman's voice," answered Myles with unusual impatience and a flash of eye. "I give him all the credit you desire and more; I know he is honourable and upright and true. What then? Highest honour has broken down before this temptation. He is made of flesh and blood after all, and a man can't live within a span of a woman he loves and be happy—not if that woman belongs to somebody else. I don't assert that his love still exists, yet it's an immortal thing—not to be killed—and though he thinks he has strangled it—who can say? It may come to life again, like he did."