"Not to-morrow. Monday."
"Lina, you are proving every moment more clearly how little you care!"
"Lorin, dear, I do care! But I must have breathing time."
This conversation took place in the brougham, in which Laline was being driven back to Kensington, as Wallace feared lest she might catch cold in the dog-cart. In the brougham, too, he could sit beside her with his arms wrapped round her, which was an ideal method of travelling and to the taste of both. To Wallace it seemed as though immense capabilities for passion and tenderness, which for years had been closed up within his heart, overflowed now for the first time. He could not lavish enough caresses upon her, could not call her by enough tender names; and the contrast between his present extreme demonstrativeness and the easy courteous self-possession of his habitual manner might well have startled Laline, but that the change in her own bearing was, if possible, even more marked.
Very early deprived of a mother's love, and placed in a position entailing a measure of responsibility, Laline had received little or no marks of affection from man or woman since her early childhood. "La p'tite Gart" had cooked her father's dinners, run on her father's errands, and taken care of the neighbours' children; and, later, Miss Lina Grahame, assistant mistress at Mrs. Melville's select Academy for Young Ladies, had been looked up to as a paragon of austere propriety, engaged from seven in the morning until nine at night in instilling English, French, needlework, and manners to her employer's pupils.
In all this life of routine there had been no love at all. For seven years the girl's whole nature, originally confiding and affectionate, had been repressed and thrown back on itself. Knowing that she was really married, she had set herself the task of crushing out of her heart every trace of tender feeling for any person of the opposite sex. She had not dared to love, and had planned for herself a future of incessant work and activity, into which no thoughts of love might ever enter. The shock of overhearing her father and husband haggling over the money bargain by which she was transferred from the one to the other had been great and even terrible; but fortunately Laline's nature was too sweet to be permanently embittered against all men by those unhappy early experiences. Still the result of these latter had been to make her both self-reliant and reserved, and to induce her to regard herself as a person set apart, for whom the happiness of loving and being loved could never exist, doomed by man's selfishness to a life of loveless solitude.
Matters being thus with her, the affection with which, almost from the moment of his entrance into Mrs. Vandeleur's house, Wallace had inspired her, came like the warmest sunshine into Laline's heart, melting the icy reserve in which it perforce was wrapped. She had never really tried to resist the feelings of interest and tenderness with which he had inspired her. He was her husband—it was right that she should love him; and neither her remembrance of his selfish treachery towards her years ago, nor the vague rumours of drunkenness and dissipation which she had heard against him recently, sufficed to diminish her growing regard. Duty and inclination went hand in hand, and she knew now that she had loved him as they wandered together under the snow-covered trees in Kensington Gardens, had loved him as they stood together in the South Sea room at his uncle's house, and that she loved him now, passionately and without reserve, receiving and returning his kisses with a warmth and tenderness which satisfied even a lover's exacting spirit, and nestling against him with a gentle confidence which touched and delighted him beyond the power of words to express.
It was nearly ten o'clock when the carriage arrived in the old-fashioned red-brick Crescent and clattered over the stone-paved court until it drew up before Mrs. Vandeleur's door. A light burned in the front room on the ground-floor, and Clare Cavan's face was clearly to be seen, pressed against the window and peeping out at them.
"Don't kiss me, Lorin—some one is watching!" whispered Laline; but her warning was thrown away.
"I am proud of my right to kiss you, darling, and I don't care who sees me!" he whispered back, as, raising his hat, he pressed his lips to hers.