Honor Endicott walked slowly back to Bear Down. The significance of her own position, as a woman apparently jilted, did not weigh with her in the least. She reflected, with a dull ache and deadness, that her accident, with a delay of ten little minutes resulting from it, had altered the whole scope and sweep of her life and another's. That Christopher Yeoland had taken his great step with very real difficulty the fact of his continued absence before it made sufficiently clear. He had not trusted himself to see her again; and now Honor's conviction grew: that her presence even at the last moment, must surely have broken down his determination and kept him at home had she so willed.
She asked herself what she might have done in the event of that ordeal, and believed that she would have tried hard to keep him.
CHAPTER XII.
THE DEFINITE DEED
Life, thus robbed of love for Honor Endicott, was reduced to a dreary round of mere duties. Within one fortnight of time these two men, severally responsible for the music and sunshine of her life, had departed out of it in a manner perfectly natural, conventional, and inevitable. Given the problems that had arisen, this was the solution to have been predicted. Mark Endicott, indeed, put it very bluntly to her; but Honor viewed the tragedy with more tender pity for her own feelings. She marvelled in secret at the great eternal mystery of human affections, at the evolution of the love instinct, which now, ennobled and sublimated through the generations of men, had achieved its present purity and perfection in the civilisation of monogamous nations; while her uncle told her, in fewer words and homelier, that between two stools she had fallen to the ground.
She was supremely miserable through dwindling days, and each of them to her seemed longer than those of the summer that was past. The shadows of two men often accompanied her lonely rides, and circumstances or places would remind her of each in turn, would suddenly stab her into acute suffering as they wakened the image of Christopher or of Myles in very life-colours.
There came a laugh once, when she overheard Pinsent and Collins congratulating each other that Bear Down had not been too precipitate in the purchase of the wedding "momentum"; but the salt was gone out of humour for a little while; and with her uncle, at least, she never laughed at all. His boundless sympathy was strained before her wayward unhappiness. She flew to paradoxes, contradictions, and whimsical conceits, all vain, and worse than vain in his judgment. She sometimes talked at random with no particular apparent object save to waken opposition. But the knitting-needles ticked placidly through long evenings beside the glowing peat: and it asked an utterance beyond measure flagrant to set them tapping, as an indication that the blind man's patience was exhausted.
About mid-December they sat together in the little parlour of the kitchen, and Honor, who lolled beside the fire, employed her pretty fingers upon no more useful task than playing with a piece of string from a grocer's parcel.
"What are you doing?" asked Mark suddenly.
"Making cats' cradles," she answered, and won from him the reproof that such a confession invited.