Lord Saltash plainly noticed nothing. Throughout that Christmas dinner he was just as gay, as debonair, as audacious, as he had been in the old days, complimented her with his usual effrontery, provoked her to laughter with all his old quick wit. She found it impossible not to respond, impossible not to expand in the warmth of his good comradeship. She seemed to be drawn into a magic circle of gaiety that could not last, that was all the more precious because it could not last. Bunny also was well within that charmed region. He was full of animation, eager, excited, even merry. She had an uneasy fear that he would pay for his high spirits later, but for the time she had not the heart to check him. She understood his feelings so thoroughly. It was so good to have Charlie with them again and to bury all the troubles of the past, so good to see the flower of friendship spring from the dead root of passion. so good to be on easy terms again with this man whom in spite of everything, she could not but regard as a kindred spirit.
They had always been sympathetic. They looked upon much in life with the same eyes. They had the same tastes, the same intuitions, often the same impulses. Yes, he had shown himself unworthy. There was a fatal flaw in his character. He was wild, lawless, immoral; but he was her friend. Somehow she could not feel that anything could ever alter that. They had been too near, too intimate. He had become like one of the family. She could not regard him in any other light. He had wounded her to the heart, but yet, with a woman's odd faithfulness, she forgave him, pitied him, understood him. Only upon that one point she had stood firm. Her innate purity had arisen as an angel with a flaming sword, dividing them. She had not been able to overlook his sins and marry him. She had known him too well--too well. Possibly even she had loved him too well also.
But all that was over now. The pain was stifled, the sacrifice was past. She could suffer herself to accept his easy friendship with no dread for the future. She could let herself be at ease with him once more, knowing herself to be beyond his reach. Once very sorely she had been tempted to yield to him, but that temptation could never occur again. Her marriage was a safe anchor from which she could never break free and drift out to sea. She could afford now to be kind, since henceforth no more than kindness could ever be expected from her. And it was so good to be with him again. With all his waywardness and instability Charlie Burchester was the most satisfying friend she had. He never wearied her. He always caught and charmed her mood. He was so rarely sensitive, so delicately alive, to every change of feeling. There was even something almost uncanny sometimes in the way he read her woman's heart, a feat for which he himself accounted by declaring that they had been born under the same star.
It all came back to her as they sat at the same board on that Christmas Day. It was just as if there had never been any lift in their friendship. The memory of the man's passionate pleading and her own anguished refusal had faded into an evil dream. They were back once more in the old happy days of comradeship before he had ever spoken to her of love.
Only Jake's presence held her to the present, and when at the end of dinner he rose to carry out his suggestion with regard to fetching her mother in the dog-cart she felt, as soon as the door closed upon him, that the old life she knew and loved had wholly returned. She and Bunny and Saltash were just children together, and they settled down to enjoy themselves as such.
CHAPTER XXII
THE FAITHFUL WIDOWER
Lord Saltash's desire to see the stud evaporated completely during the afternoon. He stayed and made himself extremely charming to Mrs. Sheppard, who returned with Jake, very fluttered and arch, to spend an hour--only an hour or Giles would be so cross--in her daughter's new home. And when she left again under Jake's escort it was already growing dark.
"I've got to talk business with Jake so I may as well wait till he comes back," said Lord Saltash comfortably, and they gathered round the blazing fire and sat in luxurious enjoyment.
Undoubtedly Bunny had enjoyed himself that afternoon, but he had begun to grow restless and irritable, signs which Maud had learned to recognize as the heralds of a wakeful night. She wondered with some uneasiness if Jake would be able to manage him with his usual success.