Alicia fixed her violet eyes on Sir Percy Carlyon, and in them was the light of triumph. "I think, papa," she said, in the sweet, affectionate voice which she always addressed her father, "if you will leave me with Sir Percy for ten minutes it would be kind. I want to tell so old a friend all about it. So here is your newspaper, and go into your own room for ten minutes and then we shall be delighted to see you."
She took the afternoon newspaper off the table and, thrusting it into General Talbott's hand with an air of tender familiarity, led him to the door and closed it after him, and then she came back to where Sir Percy stood near the window and began to pull off her long gloves.
"Have you told Miss Armytage about that summer at the hill station?" she asked calmly, with a sidelong glance. Sir Percy remained silent, but it won for him no mercy. "I see that you haven't," she said. "Yet you think it right to marry that innocent girl without telling her all? Very well, I shall marry Senator March, but neither shall I tell him all."
It occurred to Sir Percy to ask her if she meant, like himself, to be so true, so devoted in her marriage that she might have some little ground upon which to ask forgiveness. But although he by no means adopted the specious view that the law has no variation for men and women, yet he felt that no one who had violated the law in any part could rebuke his fellow-sinner, and, therefore, remained obstinately silent. Mrs. Vernon had encountered this mood before, but it made the situation rather easier for her, as Sir Percy never contradicted anything she said. After a moment or two she spoke again.
"It is a curious thing that people like Senator March, who have never been tempted, put all poor sinners in the wrong. I feel it every moment that I am with him. I never had this feeling with Guy Vernon, because from the day I married him his wickedness and his weakness were plain to me. But there is a compelling honesty about a man like Senator March from which one can't get away; it is like my father's. Senator March thinks I am marrying him for love; you think I am marrying him for money. This last is true, and I can't deny it, but I also have a disinterested motive--it will make my father happy and put him at ease concerning me. I have a good many debts of which my father knows nothing, and which he would pay, if he knew of them, with his last shilling. I couldn't keep them from him much longer and I dreaded to tell him. Now he is spared all that. I had the satisfaction of dealing honestly with Senator March when I told him that I must still give a part of my life to my father. He kissed my hand and told me he loved me the better because I loved my father so well."
Yes, it was the only redeeming love which Alicia Vernon had ever known, and it had in it a strange element of nobility and perfidy.
"I hope sincerely you may be happy," was all that Sir Percy Carlyon said.
"I don't know whether I wish you to be happy or not," Alicia replied in the same low voice.
"At least the past is now a closed book between us."
"Is the past ever a closed book? Certainly not to a woman. There are some things which are bloodstains upon the page of life and sink through and through its pages until at the very last there is still a red stain. Anyway, I don't hate Senator March and I don't wish to make him unhappy. That is as much as I can feel for any man now, but I could chop him to pieces for my father's sake or for--" The sentence remained unfinished.