“I’ll write to Aunt Harriet, and tell her to talk to him. Poor dear papa, I am afraid he is lonesome. I wish he would come over so that we could all be together again. Give him my love and a kiss.”
“You certainly have a magnificent sense of humour.”
CHAPTER XIX.
Mr. Forbes read his wife’s second letter with dry eyes. His face, during the past weeks, had been habitually hard and severe. He looked older. It was a long letter. It was fragrant with love and admitted remorse; but it reasserted that unless he made the required settlement three weeks from receipt she would hand over to the Duke’s attorneys all she possessed.
Mr. Forbes tore the letter into strips and threw them on the fire. His face had flushed as he read; and as he lay back in his chair, it relaxed somewhat.
“If she were here would I yield?” he thought. “I am thankful that she is not. Or am I? I don’t know. What fools we mortals be—in the hands of a woman. Five millions seem a small price to have her back. But to pay them, unfortunately, means the free gift of my self-respect. What is to come? What is to come? I had believed at times that this woman read my very soul and touched it. Her intuitions, her sympathy, her subtle comprehension of the highest wants of a man’s nature and reverence for them amounted to something like genius. Indeed, she had a genius for loving—a most uncommon gift. Or so it seemed to me. But I think that few men would appreciate that they were idealising a woman like Virginia Forbes. And now? I am to take back the beautiful woman, the companionable mind, I suppose—nothing more. But it is something to have been a fool for twenty-two years. I cannot say that I have any regrets. And possibly it was my own fault that I could not make her love me better.”
He looked up at the picture. “Several times,” he thought, “I have felt like mounting a chair and kissing it. And if I did, I should feel as if I were kissing the lips of a corpse.”
“Ned! Are you there?”
Mr. Forbes rose instantly. The door had opened, and a tall woman, not unlike Augusta, but with something more of mellowness, had entered.
“I am glad to see you, Harriet,” he said. “What brings you at this hour? Have you come to help me through my solitary dinner?”