It is one of the saddest, if not one of the most comforting, things in life, that when people have caught a glimpse of the best, the second-best can never again content them. If they have once—be it only for a moment—worn the best robe and sat down to the feast, they will never more really enjoy the husks of the far country; even though the citizens of that country prepare the same with their most delicate arts, and serve them up on gold plate. Unwise men do not consider this, and fools do not understand it; so that the former find out too late that their souls must be starved to death for lack of that better thing which they once so carelessly threw away; while the latter enjoy their husky diet in peace, unknowing that there is any better thing at all.
Isabel Carnaby belonged to the former class. She was wise enough to recognize the best when she saw it; and foolish enough, having seen it, to let it go. She might have been a happy woman, had she had more heart or less; but, now, such as she had was breaking. Suddenly the veil, which she had so carefully draped in front of her inner life, was ruthlessly torn away, and the ideal self, whom she thought she had slain, woke up in the renewed strength of a long slumber; and she knew that she loved Paul as she had loved him in the beginning and as she would love him to the end, and that no other man could ever supplant him in her love or in her life. She could have laughed aloud at the grim irony of the thing, as she realized that the brilliant scene around her, with its perfection of everything that civilization has to offer, was as nothing in her eyes in comparison with a quaint little chapel in an old-fashioned country town, where she and Paul once stood side by side and sang a hymn together.
"How these people would laugh at me," she said to herself, "if they knew that I would gladly give up all the best music of the finest orchestras in London, to hear once more 'There is a land of pure delight' sung in a Methodist chapel! But, all the same, I would."
When the concert was over and they went into the supper-room, Isabel was strangely quiet and subdued; which convinced Lord Wrexham more forcibly than ever that she had been sitting in a draught and would be ill next day.
"My dear, I wish you had a little wrap with you," he said, "to put on when you walk along the corridors and through the drawing-rooms."
"Well I haven't," replied Isabel; "I am so fond of giving little raps to my friends that I don't keep any for myself—which perhaps is too altruistic on my part."
When they had had supper and were leaving the Palace, Lord Robert Thistletown drew Isabel on one side. "I only just want to say good-bye to you," he said; and she saw, to her surprise, that his usually rosy face was very white.
"Why, where ever are you going to, Bobby, that you should say good-bye instead of good-night?"
"I am starting with my regiment for India to-morrow. There is some nasty fighting out there, don't you know? and we are ordered to the front."
"Oh, Bobby!"