He would have been blind indeed if he had not realized that his marriage was a matter of importance and hope to many women; that any choice indeed was possible to him.
He was a little impatient with himself at times that it should be this one particular woman who held him; even now, when she had left him smarting and uncomfortable, he was falling back into that old train of anxious thought about her.
Of course, he knew her history as the world knew it. Most people were kind about Camilla. There had been nothing subtle in the way in which her husband had wronged her.
It was the knowledge of this wrong done to her that drew Haverford to her so surely. He longed to give her protection, to build up barriers between her and all those things that had been legacies of her married life.
And, of course, there was only one way in which he could do this.
All at once he realized that he had ceased to doubt or speculate as to the future of such a marriage; hope became deliberate intention. And still the path was not clear. He knew his own heart, but what about Camilla's heart?
Metaphorically, he stretched out his hands to catch that dancing, laughing, white-robed figure, only to feel that the soft, filmy draperies slipped from his grasp, and that Camilla was dancing away far, far out of his reach.
When he alighted at the familiar station he almost yielded to the temptation to put himself in the train again and go back to London.
As the doubt and uncertainty dropped out of his heart, something new came in their place.
Now he was jealous. He wanted to be sure of her. He wanted to hold her in his arms as that other man had held her. He wanted to lock her to him, to feel that she belonged to him.