"Before Carson marries Miss Bellairs."
"Does that mean at the end of a fortnight?"
"If I make no discoveries associating Carson with the murder, it does."
"Oh, Lord! do you want to hang the man as well as rob him of his wife?"
"Jim, I'm not vindictive."
"Goodness only knows what you are, Mallow. Well, least said soonest mended; go, and good luck go with you."
After this conversation, in which, it will be noticed, Mallow gave no hint of his interview with Olive, he went to London, and was absent for the greater part of a fortnight.
Olive, too, kept her own counsel about that stormy wooing. But she felt a strange joy in recalling to herself its every detail. It was the joy of a woman who loves to be dominated and to be ruled by the man she adores. Had Mallow cut the Gordian knot of her difficulties, and, in the face of all her objection, forced her to marry him, secretly she would have been pleased and relieved. As it was, he had left her with an enigmatic utterance which she could not understand.
Yet this time of trial was in some ways beneficial to her. It strengthened the better qualities of her nature, which otherwise might have weakened in the sunshine of perpetual good fortune. The ills of this life, like drugs, are unpleasant but necessary. They brace our mental organization as do tonics our physical.
Olive's twenty-first birthday was celebrated by a dinner to her friends and tenantry. The Manor House and its grounds were thrown open in the old-fashioned, hospitable style, and a plentiful spread was provided under a temporary tent. Here farmers and labourers toasted their young mistress in the strongest and most stinging of ales. Speeches were made and congratulations were offered, and had Mallow but been present in the character of her future husband, Olive would have been completely happy. As it was, she had to introduce Carson in his place. But she accepted the encomiums passed upon his pleasant face and amiable speeches with such show of pleasure as she could command from herself. She could not deny that the husband chosen for her by her father was both attractive and agreeable, that he was even lovable in some ways--perhaps in his very weakness. Laurence was pre-eminently a man of strength; a man imperious and self-sustaining; a man who would love a woman and master a woman, and fulfil the fundamental law of Nature that the male is the lord of creation from an oyster to a wife; in short, a man stable as the universe, fixed as the stars. Angus was pleasant, good-tempered, handsome and weak. He would have made a charming woman, Olive thought with contempt. The Indian bangle was not much out of place, after all, upon his wrist.