'Then I have your promise, Mrs. Griswold, your positive assurance, that your letters to your husband shall contain no intimation whatever of my absence from New York?'
'They shall contain no mention of you whatever.'
'Pardon me, that will not do. Your correspondence with your husband is to be in journal form--you are right, it was not very delicate in him to tell any one anything of the kind--'
'I did not speak, sir.'
'True, there was no need of speech; but that journal, if it contains no mention of me, will be very unlike what Griswold expects.'
'I cannot help that. I can suppress all mention of you, but I cannot write letters about you, if that is the meaning you are aiming at. But you need not hesitate for that consideration. I shall merely have to remind my husband that we never agreed about you, and to say that I avoided on purpose the disagreeable subject.'
A momentary gleam of fury shot across Warren's face; but he suppressed it, and made her a slightly artificial bow.
'This is agreed to, then,' he said; 'and so this interview, which had so stormy a beginning, ends peaceably. I am utterly beaten, Mrs. Griswold, acknowledging my defeat, and accepting the penalty. You will see me no more during Griswold's absence, and when we next meet the old things will have passed away.'
He bowed deeply and slowly, and walked out of the room with a quiet deliberate step; but there was something in his air, in his attitude, in his smile, as little like a beaten man as could be. When he had left the house--she waited, listening for the closing of the street-door--Helen Griswold lay back in her chair, and wept such bitter tears of anger, humiliation, and loneliness as her eyes had never before shed.
This terrible interview had terminated much better than she could have hoped. She had got rid of Warren, who would be powerless for the future to harm her, and she had avoided the necessity for wounding her husband. When he returned, she not only hoped that foreign travel and new acquaintances would have weaned him from his infatuation for Warren, but supplied him with a sounder standard whereby to measure his claim to regard. But where was the triumph which she ought to have felt at such a solution of the difficulty which had beset and harassed her whole married life? No signs of triumph came to the overwrought feelings and tired nerves; on the contrary, a strange kind of terror, depression, and misery settled down upon her, the more irresistible as she endeavoured to disentangle and sort the incidents of the interview which had just taken place. Her woman's instinct really aroused, and not wrong for once, told her the victory had been too easily won.