“I’m sure she’ll take it like an angel,” said Lee, who had told Mary what she was to expect, and could still hear that young lady’s loud delighted laugh. “And be sure you’re good to her. She’s very much alone in the world.”
Lee’s conscience hurt her less at this deliberate scheming than it might have done a few weeks since, for she had by this time convinced herself that Mary was really in love with Randolph; and she was certainly a wife of whom any man might be proud.
On Tuesday evening as Lee and her friends were descending the fell—on whose broad summit they had laughed the afternoon away, and Lee had been petted and flattered to her heart’s content—she paused suddenly and put her hand above her eyes. Far away, walking slowly along the ridge of hillocks that formed the southeastern edge of the moor, was a man whose carriage, even at that distance, was familiar. She stared hard. It was certainly Cecil. He was alone, and, undoubtedly, thinking. She made up her mind in an instant.
“I see Cecil,” she said. “I’m going to bring him home. You go on to the Abbey.” And she hurried away.
Doubtless he had been there for some time, and had sought the solitude deliberately: the men were shooting miles away; apparently even sport had failed him. She made tight little fists of her hands. Her morbidity had not outlasted the night of her momentous interview with her husband, but her old friends had both satisfied her longings for previous conditions, and rooted her desire for a few months’ freedom. It was true that, with the exception at Randolph, they bored her a little at times, but the fact remained that they symbolised the freest and most brilliant part of her life, and that they were in delightful accord with the lighter side of her nature. Cecil, outlined against the sky over there in the purple, alone, and, beyond a doubt, perturbed and unhappy, made her feel as cruel and selfish as she could feel in her present mood. She rebelled against the serious conversation before her, and wondered if she had slipped from her heights forever. They had been very pleasant.
Cecil saw her coming and met her half-way. She smiled brilliantly, slipped her hand in his, and kissed him.
“You are thinking it over,” she said, with the directness that he liked.
“I have been thinking about a good many things. I have been wondering how I could have lived with you for three years and known you so little. I hardly knew you the other night at all, and I never believed that you would care to leave me.”
“Cecil! You are so serious. You take things so tragically. I can’t look at it as you do, because I have seen women going to Europe all my life without their husbands. One would think I was wanting to get a divorce!”
“Are you trying to make me feel that I am making an ass of myself? I think you know that I have my own ideas about most things, and that I am not in the least ashamed of them. I married you to live with you, to keep you here beside me so long as we both lived. I have no understanding of and no patience with any other sort of marriage. And I think you knew when you accepted me that I had not the making of an American husband in me.”