Dare sat on the stoep of his hotel in Johannesburg reading a letter from Mrs Carruthers, who kept up a spasmodic correspondence with him at his own urgent request; her letters, he explained, gave him a sense of living still in the world. One clause in this letter interested him particularly; it was a clause which referred to Pamela.
“I have just returned,” the writer stated, “from the christening of the Arnott baby,—a querulous man-child whom I have undertaken to keep uncontaminated from the wiles of the devil,—a preposterous thing to ask one human being to do for another. Being a childless woman myself, I am more afraid of my godson than of the devil, the latter being so conveniently unsubstantial. Whether it is the added cares of maternity, or due to the fact that the connubial bliss I once dilated upon to you is not so assertive as it was a year ago, your sweet-faced divinity is decidedly less prepossessing in appearance. I would never have believed that a year could age a woman as it has aged Pamela Arnott. Besides looking older, she is considerably less gay. But she is a dear woman, all the same.”
The writer passed on to other matters, and mentioned that she was glad there was a chance of seeing him shortly. She hoped while he was in Cape Town he would spare them a few days.
Dare folded the letter and placed it in his pocket-book; then he sat back in his chair and fell to thinking about Pamela. Why, he wondered, should a year make such a difference in a woman’s appearance that to her intimate friends who saw her continually this change should be so apparent? And what had caused the diminution in the married happiness which, little as he had seen of the Arnott’s home life, he too had been conscious of? Pamela had radiated happiness on the evening he first met her.
He recalled Mrs Carruthers’ words, uttered carelessly to him that night in the garden, when she had alluded to the Arnotts’ marriage as an instance of perennial courtship, and had added, with a touch of sarcasm not altogether innocent of malice: “But, after all, five years is but a step of the journey.”
That bore out what more than one married man had told him, that it was the silliest mistake man or woman ever made to imagine that because one is violently in love for a period that state of erotic bliss is going to endure.
“It’s beyond the bounds of possibility,” one man had said to him recently in palliation of his own unfaithfulness. “And it’s a good thing all round for the race that we are as we are.”
But Dare had a conviction that, given the right woman, his love would endure to the end. The right woman for him, he believed, was Pamela; and she was beyond his reach.
Feeling as he did about Pamela, the wisest course for him to pursue was to keep out of her way. He realised this fully; at the same time he desired very earnestly to see her. Since she was ignorant of his feeling in regard to her, he argued, there could be no harm in their meeting; he had sufficient self-control to be able to converse with a woman without allowing her to suspect that he was interested in her in any marked degree. Indeed, he would have found his interest difficult to explain. To assert that he had fallen in love at sight with the face of a girl he had seen several years ago and never spoken to until he met her later as a married woman, would have lain him open to ridicule; it would have strained the credulity, he felt, of Pamela herself. He had heard of cases of love at first sight, but he had not believed in them prior to his own experience. It had always seemed to him that love could be begotten only of some quality of deep attraction in the personality of the individual. Certainly had he not found those attractive qualities in Pamela when eventually he met her, the romance he had cherished for five years would have gone the way of dreams; but his meeting with her kindled afresh the fires of his sleeping fancy; and the romance, which had promised to remain only a sentimental memory, was quickened into life. What he had loved in the girl’s face, he loved again in her personality. He was quite satisfied that Pamela was as sweet as she looked; and he determined to play the unobtrusive part of the silent male friend to this woman who was his ideal. He would not deny himself the pleasure of her society merely because he loved her. Never from look or word of his should she guess his secret. But if destiny ever offered him the chance of serving her, he would count himself well rewarded for his undeclared devotion.
The news concerning Pamela in Mrs Carruthers’ letter, quite as much as his own feelings, made him feverishly anxious to see her again. Business was taking him to Cape Town; he decided that when he was through with the business he would put in a little time on his own account; and Mrs Carruthers’ invitation fitted in with his plans.