“How did you know it was Captain Pascoe?” asked George in a hard, dry voice.
“Heard the little red man call him so,” murmured Nouna sleepily.
George drew back, shocked, wounded, and perplexed. To correct her for petty deceits was like demonstrating to a baby the iniquity of swallowing its toys; she could not understand how it was wrong to obtain by any means in her power anything she wanted. There was no great harm done after all, when the deed was followed by such quick and innocent confession. But none the less, the habit showed a moral obliquity which could not fail to be a distressing sign that the ennobling influences of matrimony, literature, the arts and religion had not yet had any great and enduring effect. He withdrew into the corner furthest from her, bewildering himself with conjectures as to what the right way to treat her might really be, not at all willing as yet to own that the wives who fascinate men most are not the docile creatures who like clay can be moulded to any shape their lord and master may please to give them, but retain much of the resistance of marble, which requires a far higher degree of skill and patience in the working, and had best be left alone altogether except by fully qualified artists of much experience in that medium. Even in the midst of his disturbed musings a consolation, if not a light, came to him. He heard Nouna move. He was staring out at the darkening landscape through one of the side-windows, and did not look round: before he knew she was near him she had climbed into his lap.
“Put your arms round me; I want to go to sleep,” cooed she.
And, alas, for philosophy and high morality! at the touch of her arms all his fears and his misgivings melted into passionate, throbbing tenderness, and he drew the head of the perhaps not wholly undesigning Nouna down on to his shoulder with the sudden feeling that his doubts of her entire perfection had burst like bubbles in the air.
Nevertheless, it became clear again that evening that young Mrs. Lauriston contemplated a revolution in the tenor of her quiet life.
“I wonder,” she said pensively at supper, resting from the labour of eating grapes, with a face of concentrated earnestness, “that mamma has taken no notice of the letter I sent her the very day after I was married. I told her of a very particular wish I had, and you know mamma always has let me have every wish I have ever made; I can’t understand it.”
“What wish was that?” asked George, feeling it useless to complain of the want of confidence which had prevented her from communicating it before.
“I want to have a large house that I can furnish as I please, and where I can receive my friends,” said Nouna with rather a haughty, regal air.
George began to see that it was of no use to oppose the sociable bent of her mind, and he occupied himself therefore in wondering whether this wish of Nouna’s, expressed in a letter which passed through the lawyers’ hands before his last visit to them, had had any relation to their unexpected announcement of a possible accession of his wife to fortune.