"Are you happy?" she asked in a low voice.
The look that flashed into the other woman's face was a revelation to her.
"So happy," she said. "Oh, Caroline, it is all the beginning over again, only better, truer, and, please God, more lasting! Caroline, I love him. He is so young, so beautiful, so full of poetry, he makes life quite different! Oh, I love him, and I never thought I should love any one again after Ned."
Caroline turned away; her lips quivered.
"Then we who care for you must be content," she said. There was a bitter and yet a sad note in her voice.
Cuthbert Baynhurst's wife stood and looked at her.
"Of course," she said a little hardly, "I know you think I did a dreadful thing, and I will tell you one thing, Caroline, that I wish from the bottom of my heart that I could have come by this happiness in a different way. I don't want to excuse myself, for I have no excuse, but equally I don't want you or anybody else to make up things that don't exist. Don't for instance, run away with the idea that Rupert is breaking his heart about me. He is much too prosaic, too stolid, too commonplace. You saw for yourself how calmly he took the whole thing. If he had been another sort of man, well!" she laughed, "there might have been four inches of steel for Cuthbert, and perhaps a bullet through my brain."
Caroline turned and looked at her coldly.
"How can you speak so foolishly. What do you know of his heart? You have never understood him; even when you had the life of his life in your hands you sneered at him as poor and paltry. Make a mockery of him to others if you will, but not to those who know what sort of man he is. It is pitiful; it makes your wrong so much, much worse."
Camilla looked almost frightened. Her lip quivered, and tears gathered in her eyes.