And then he led the conversation to his own affairs.
"I like your friend so much, Madge," said Lady Davyntry to Mrs. Baldwin, as the sisters-in-law were enjoying the customary dressing-room confabulation. "He is such a frank, hearty, good fellow, and not the least rough, or what we think of as 'colonial' in his manners. What a pleasure it must have been to you to see him again!"
"Yes," said Margaret absently.
"How tired your voice sounds, darling! you are quite knocked up, I am afraid. You must go to bed at once, and try to be all right by to-morrow. I delight in the idea of a wedding; it is ages since I have been at one, except yours. What sort of a boy is Mr. Meredith's son?" she continued, in a discursive way to which she was rather prone; "he looks clever."
"He looks knowing," said Margaret, "more than clever, I think. I don't like him."
"If she knew--if she, too, only knew," ran the changeless refrain of Margaret's thoughts when she was again alone, "if she could but know what I have lived through since she saw me last! What a change has fallen on everything--what a deadly blight! How hard, and how utterly in vain I strive against this phantom which haunts me! If I had but listened to the warning which came to me when I found out first that he loved me, the warning which her words and the yearning of my own weak heart dispelled! If I had but heeded the secret inspiration which told me my past should never be taken into any honest, unsullied life! And yet, my God, how happy, how wonderfully, fearfully happy I was for a while--for happiness is a fearful thing in this perishing world. Would I have heeded any warning that bade me renounce it? Could I have given him up, even for his own sake?"
She rose and paced the room in one of those keen but transient paroxysms of distress which, all unknown by any human being, were of frequent occurrence, and which had not quite subsided when her husband came into her dressing-room.
"Margaret," he said to her gravely, when he had elicited from her an avowal of some of her feelings, "you are bringing this dead past into our life yourself, as no other power on earth could bring it. Do you remember when you promised to live for me only? Can you not keep your word? This is the trial of that faith you pledged to me. Is it failing you?"
"No," she said, "no, it is not failing, and I can keep my word. But"--and she clasped her arms around his neck and burst into sudden tears--"my child, my child!"