“Doll,” said Ernest, in a wild voice, and commencing to tremble, “who was that passed us?”
“A lady,” was the answer.
“A lady; yes, I know that—what lady?”
“I don’t know—a lady with children.”
It was a fib; but she could not tell him then; an instinct warned her not to do so.
“Oh, it is strange, Doll, strange; but, do you know, I felt just now as though Eva were very near me. Come, let us go home!”
Just then the cloud got over the sun again, and they walked home in the shadow. Apparently, too, all their talkativeness had gone the way of the sun. They had nothing to say.
CHAPTER III.
INTROSPECTIVE
Eva Plowden could scarcely be said to be a happy woman. A refined woman who has deliberately married one man when she loves another is not as a rule happy afterwards, unless, indeed, she is blessed, or cursed, with a singularly callous nature. But there are degrees and degrees of unhappiness. Such a fate as Eva’s would have killed Dorothy, and would have driven Florence, bad as she might otherwise be, to suicide or madness. But with Eva herself it was not so; she was not sufficiently finely strung to suffer thus. Hers was not a very happy life, and that was all about it. She had been most miserable; but when the first burst of her misery had passed, like the raving storm that sometimes ushers in a wet December day, she had more or less reconciled herself—like a sensible woman—to her position. The day was always rather wet, it is true; but still the sun peeped out now and again, and if life was not exactly a joyous thing, it was at least endurable.
And yet with it all she loved Ernest in her heart as much as ever; his memory was inexpressibly dear to her, and her regrets were sometimes very bitter. On the whole, however, she had got over it wonderfully—better than anybody would have thought possible, who could have witnessed her agony some years before, when Florence told her the whole truth immediately after the wedding. The Sabine women, we are told, offered every reasonable resistance to their rape by the Romans, but before long they gave the strongest proofs of reconciliation to their lot. There was something of the Sabine woman about Eva. Indeed, the contrast between her state of mind as regarded Ernest, and Ernest’s state of mind as regarded her, would make a curious study. They each loved the other, and yet how different had the results of that love been on the two natures! To Eva it had been and was a sorrow, sometimes a very real one; to Ernest, the destruction of all that made life worth living. The contrast, indeed, was almost pitiable, it was so striking; so wide a gulf was fixed between the two. The passion of the one was a wretched thing compared to the other. But both were real; it was merely a difference of degree. If Eva’s affection was weak when measured by Ernest’s, it was because the soil in which it grew was poorer. She gave all she had to give.