At the beginning the latter would feel annoyed, for her sympathies had all been with Bayle’s plans; then some clever point would take her attention; her young reason would yield to the ingenuity of the highly-cultivated old man’s attack; and finally she would mentally range herself upon his side, and reward him with plaudits from her little white hands, darting a triumphant look now at Bayle, as if saying, “There we have won!”
Highly good-tempered were all these encounters; and they were always followed by another harmony, that of music, Bayle playing, as of old, to Millicent’s accompaniment; more often to that of her child.
It was a calm and peaceful little English home, that every day grew more attractive to the old club-lounger and lover of the sea.
He coloured slightly the first time Bayle came and found him there. The next time he nodded, as much as to say, “I thought I would run up.” The next it seemed a matter of course that an easy-chair should be ready for him in one corner, where he took his place after pressing Mrs Hallam’s hand warmly, and drawing Julia to him to kiss her as if she were his child.
There was a delicacy, a display of tender reverence, that disarmed all suspicion of there being an undercurrent at work. “He is one of my oldest friends,” Mrs Hallam had said to herself; “he feels sympathy for me in my trouble, and he seems to love Julie with a father’s love. Why should I estrange him? Why keep Julie from his society?”
It never entered into her mind that, by the sentence of the law, she was, as it were, a woman in the position of a widow, for her husband was socially dead. The seed of such an idea would have fallen upon utterly barren ground, and never have put forth germinating shoots.
No; there was the one thought ever present in her heart, that sooner or later her husband’s innocence would be proclaimed, and then this terrible present would glide away, to be forgotten in the happiness to come.
Sir Gordon, with all his frank openness of manner, saw everything. The slightest word was weighed; each action was watched; and when he returned to his chambers in St. James’s—a tiny suite of very close and dark rooms, which Tom Porter treated as if they were the cabins of a yacht—he would cast up the observations he had made.
“Bayle means the widow,” he said to himself, as he sat alone; “yes, he means the widow. She is a widow. Well, he is a young man, and I am—well, an old fool.”
Another night he was off upon the other tack.