"That is what Duke meant," she muttered to herself helplessly.
Peter Muir watched her with a half-cynical, half-admiring smile.
"Well, you know best, my dear. And, of course, I personally would never let you come to want." The capable woman looked at him, the incapable man, with wondering tolerance. "Still, I must say I am disappointed. I should like to have seen the governor's face when you sprang it upon him. Remember he is the villain of the piece and, as I said, deserves everything he can get."
"That may be," replied Marrion, "but can't you see we were all at fault? And we have to pay for it. We must--you can't get rid of the past."
She said the words over and over to herself, and it was not till she reached her lodgings that she realised fully that the past had claimed the future. Yet what else could she have done? If she had only known what Duke would have said! Had he found out the paper, or had he not? Was that the reason why in those short ten days of heaven he had never, never, never alluded to the past? And yet that heavenly present had become the past too, and had stretched out into the future. Had she been taken by surprise? Had she made another mistake?
She threw herself on her bed and cried quite foolishly, until perforce, being physically unable to cry any more, her mind reasserted itself and thought came again.
One thing seemed clear. She could not possibly tell what Duke knew or did not know; she could not be sure what he would have thought; and she would have no more of trying to impose her views on him.
That being so, the only person who had any say in the matter was Lord Drummuir. For the sake of the heir he might absolve her of the promise. But the child might be a girl, it might not live. Finally she began to cry again softly, silently; the tears that count for utter soul-weariness. And in truth she was weary--the one thing that seemed clear being that she had failed; that she had mismanaged everything, that everything seemed in a hopeless tangle. She was, in sober truth, very near the limit of perfect sanity when, with a passport secured through Peter Muir's Vienna influence, she started for Krakowitz, the village on the Russian side of the Carpathians, near which the Pauloffski estates lay. It was a difficult journey--one which she had judged rightly had better be undertaken at once; but the change did her good, and she was almost herself again before it came to a conclusion; yet as the sledge with its tinkling bells and four horses toiled up the last hill or two she felt depression come upon her again. The outlook, supremely beautiful, was still melancholy to a degree. Snow, snow everywhere. The towering peaks, the valleys, the pine forests all burdened with it, like Marmaduke's grave had been. A light burden, but so cold--so deathly cold!
As the sledge dashed up the steep narrow drive and the pine trees that swept their snow layered branches overhead some of their burden fell in soft masses on Marrion's furs.
The driver turned round with a smile and said in Russian: