“You must not fret about these things, now,” Valentine said, soothingly.
Her distress was so real to him he felt as though he were in close contact with an aching human heart, a heart suddenly charged with the sorrow of a folly, worked into a tragedy.
This was about all Christina did say on that long, long journey. She was content to sit in her corner of the railway carriage and feel herself watched over and tended by this man, whose allegiance she had craved for so sharply, and who had seemed so far away.
To Valentine it was a torture each time the slow train was brought to anchor at some small station; every minute was a minute lost. Yet he clung to the hope of seeing Mark again, and it was a great comfort to know that Grace was with the poor fellow. Mark would not know that Grace was there, for consciousness had left him while his injuries were being attended to; but there had been a moment in which Valentine had bent over his bed, and had been rewarded by a flash of recognition from the dull eyes.
It had been Grace’s suggestion that Christina should be brought. It was a duty to bring the wife to her dying husband, but Christina little guessed how much this duty was costing Valentine. She had no desire to reach London.
If the train could have gone round and round in a circle she would have been content. Her imagination conjured the present into a dream of the future, that future when, as Valentine’s wife, it would be her due to receive all his care and anxious thought.
“I shall win him,” she told herself, confidently. Now that she had come in direct contact with him again, she felt she had been right to have faith in her powers, for she saw his weakness. Nevertheless, he was not a man to be won as she had won Mark Wentworth.
It was not merely physical loveliness that would have sway with this man; there must be a nature as well, just that gentle, half-timid nature that the conventional man credits the conventional woman with possessing. Valentine was, so Christina quickly determined, one of those men who did not care for independence in a woman, but who would lose his head and his heart to a delicate, clinging creature who dared make no step alone.
“He to care for Polly!” she said to herself, scornfully. “Why, the idea is absurd—that is, unless Polly is changed altogether. All her life she has been a spitfire and an independent creature. She could not possibly attract this man.”
London reached, Valentine piloted Lady Wentworth into a cab, and they drove away through gaslit streets on and on till they reached the country-like neighborhood where poor Mark Wentworth lay dying.