"There certainly is a poor spirit in the old boy if he doesn't feel under a lifelong obligation to you for your goodness. I should, if it were me.—Look, though, we shall have to go now; they are beginning to say good night."
And as they found the others he thought to himself, "Well, men may be poachers like I am, but I am hanged if they are such weasels as women!"
Lady Anningford joined Lady Ethelrida that night in her room, after they had seen Zara to hers, and they began at once upon the topic which was thrilling them all.
"There is something the matter, Ethelrida, darling," Lady Anningford said. "I have talked to Tristram for a long time to-night, and, although he was bravely trying to hide it, he was bitterly miserable; spoke recklessly of life one minute, and resignedly the next; and then asked me, with an air as if in an abstract discussion, whether Hector and Theodora were really happy—because she had been a widow. And when I said, 'Yes, ideally so,' and that they never want to be dragged away from Bracondale, he said, so awfully sadly, 'Oh, I dare-say; but then they have children.' It is too pitiful to hear him, after only a week! What can it be? What can have happened in the time?"
"It is not since, Anne," Ethelrida said, beginning to unfasten her dress. "It was always like that. She had just the look in her eyes the night we all first met her, at Mr. Markrute's at dinner—that strange, angry, pained, sorrowful look, as though she were a furnace of resentment against some fate. I remember an old colored picture we had on a screen—it is now in the housekeeper's room—it was one of those badly-drawn, lurid scenes of prisoners being dragged off to Siberia in the snow, and there was a woman in it who had just been separated from her husband and baby and who had exactly the same expression. It used to haunt me as a child, and Mamma had it taken out of the old nursery. And Zara's eyes haunt me now in the same way."
"She never had any children, I suppose?" asked Lady Anningford.
"Never that I heard of—and she is so young; only twenty-three now."
"Well, it is too tragic! And what is to be done? Can't you ask the uncle? He must know."
"I did, to-night, Anne—and he answered, so strangely, that 'yes, there was something which at times troubled her, but it would pass.'"
"Good gracious!" said Anne. "It can't be a hallucination. She is not crazy, is she? That would be worse than anything."