Rhoda smiled a little, conscious of the extreme curiosity her friend must be feeling, and determined not to gratify it. For by this time, though her sunken cheeks were hard to reconcile with the enjoyment of a summer holiday, she had matured a resolve to betray nothing of what she had gone through. Her state of mind resembled that of the ascetic who has arrived at a morbid delight in self-torture. She regarded the world with an intense bitterness, and persuaded herself not only that the thought of Everard Barfoot was hateful to her soul, but that sexual love had become, and would ever be, to her an impure idea, a vice of blood.
“I suppose,” she said carelessly, “Mr. Widdowson will try to divorce his wife.”
“I am in dread of that. But they may have made it up.”
“Of course you have no doubt of her guilt?”
Mary tried to understand the hard, austere face, with its touch of cynicism. Conjecture as to its meaning was not difficult, but, in the utter absence of information, certainty there could be none. Under any circumstances, it was to be expected that Rhoda would think and speak of Mrs. Widdowson no less severely than of the errant Bella Royston.
“I have some doubt,” was Miss Barfoot’s answer. “But I should be glad of some one else’s favourable opinion to help my charity.”
“Miss Madden hasn’t been here, you see. She certainly would have come if she had felt convinced that her sister was wronged.”
“Unless a day or two saw the end of the trouble—when naturally none of them would say any more about it.”
This was the possibility which occupied Rhoda’s reflections as long as she lay awake that night.
Her feelings on entering the familiar bedroom were very strange. Even before starting for her holiday she had bidden it good-bye, and at Seascale, that night following upon the “perfect day,” she had thought of it as a part of her past life, a place abandoned for ever, already infinitely remote. Her first sensation when she looked upon the white bed was one of disgust; she thought it would be impossible to use this room henceforth, and that she must ask Miss Barfoot to let her change to another. To-night she did not restore any of the ornaments which were lying packed up. The scent of the room revived so many hours of conflict, of hope, that it caused her a sick faintness. In frenzy of detestation she cursed the man who had so disturbed and sullied the swift, pure stream of her life.