"Poor Colonel Thomas!" commented Mrs. Gourlay. "I recollect when he was the first young man in the county. He has gone all to pieces in the last year. He was rather high once, but Amanda was too much for him. Sam calls her 'Petruchio in petticoats.'"
Her tones smote her listener's ear as sounds coming from afar. Poor Colonel Thomas! Had he ever been in love with that sharp-tongued woman? How terrible for a woman to have upon her conscience the wreck of a man's life. If Robert should ever come to wear that bowed look—if instead of the proud confidence that well became his comely Saxon features, he should show in sunken eyes and fitful flush the marks of that ill remedy that promises but never brings "surcease of sorrow...." But he was too strong, too sane; misery could never drive him to dissipation, although it might drive him to desperation of another sort. Her quick fancy began to picture Robert estranged from the woman he loved. Mentally she saw him growing cold, gloomy and reserved—their intimacy gone as if it had never been, and they two, bound by unbreakable ties, aging in sight of each other, their lives dragging on in a way that might come to end in mutual aversion and disgust. She knew that Robert would construe her going away to-day, after their cold parting, into a determination to assert herself against him, and still worse, to seek abroad sympathy for that which she was bound as a loving wife to bear in silence and to forget.
The proud Fitzhugh blood flamed in her cheeks and her head flung up unconsciously. But at the same instant there came into her mind, as a bugle note sounds amid the horrid discord of battle, a sentence Robert had uttered to her once in the early days of their love, when he had inadvertently offended her by a careless remark: "A man is not to be judged by one word, but by all the acts of his life."
And as if in her mental struggle she had been seeking some maxim as a guide, she fastened upon this and repeated it over and over to herself.
All this time she had been mechanically giving outward attention to Mrs. Gourlay, although that shrewd woman, comprehending her absent glance, made small exactions upon her for reply. But seeing a sudden brightness take the place of her friend's dull gaze, she gave her talk more point.
"Sam is home, my dear. He came yesterday, and he says he means to pay us an old-fashioned visit. I hope the weather will keep fine so we can have some dancing picnics. He declares they are better fun than anything in Philadelphia."
"Yes, I always liked them—when I was a girl."
"What are you now, an aged woman? Nonsense, you are even prettier than you used to be when Sam spent his days on the road between our place and your father's. Ah, child, you treated Sam badly. He never got over your marriage, poor fellow. I don't know how he will bear meeting you to-day, without any preparation. But men's hearts bend, they never break; that's one comfort. Still, perhaps you'd best not flirt too hard with him."
Linda started and looked squarely at her friend. She knew that in the code of the Virginia matron, herself holding her girlhood's coquetries in dear remembrance, such meetings between old flames and mild renewals of former admiration were perfectly harmless and natural. But her husband would think differently. He might believe this meeting pre-meditated on her part; believe that she sought diversion of a dangerous and a doubtful nature. For she knew well, and he had guessed, that Sam Hilton's courtship of her had been no idle pastime, and that the young Southerner bore the Englishman a grudge which would make him a swift partisan if there once entered his head the slightest suspicion that she had reason to complain of the treatment she received.
Had she? Her husband was in general goodness itself, all indulgence and kindness except when wrought upon by outer irritating quality, or annoyed at carelessness in herself. For she was forgetful—not wantonly careless, but lacking in that perfect method his good taste demanded. He was arbitrary—yes—still, some of the blame was hers, and if they had differences it was her place to give in. So the wife told herself in the quick interval between Mrs. Gourlay's last remark, and the turning of the carriage into the east fork of the road that marked half the distance between the two residences.