Nature was exacting her toll for his unhealthy, sedentary life, with its late hours, and lack of exercise, and all the tenderness for which Gay in those days had no other outlet, expended itself on him. She was a most devoted nurse, but to Carlton it almost looked as if, like the little boys and old Sam Weller's coach, the Professor had done it "a-purpose," when he lingered so unconscionably long a time over his convalescence, and the beautiful house in Norfolk Street still lacked a mistress.
It would be a cold, practical mistress, who never gave its master a kiss, or word of love, or welcome, and who as wife might reasonably be expected to be still more the "woman with no nonsense about her," that Gay evidently nowadays aspired to be.
Some men like brilliant women, hard and bright, others prefer hearts warm and tender. Carlton was one of these last, for, as Lossie had divined, there was a great capacity for romantic love in the man. Sometimes when most starved for sympathy, for appreciation where he had the right to expect it, he remembered the hot flood of devotion, of passion, that Lossie had poured out on him, and shivered in the isolation to which Gay from the first had banished, and rigorously kept him.
The heart makes its own decisions—Gay's had made hers in that passionate cry, "Come back, for I love you, Chris," and Carlton had thought that he knew better than her heart what was good for her, and reaped his reward in an automaton that talked, and smiled, and conducted itself with perfect grace and decorum, but that was not Gay.
It was the other Gay he wanted—the girl so full of life, and charm, and sparkle—the girl who could give brave kisses, and love with the thoroughness she put into everything that she did, the delicious comrade, the trusty counsellor, the dear household fairy who had the knack of creating a home wherever she might be, and that he had not hitherto found.
Well, he would not find it now—"for without hearts, there is no home"—and his town and country houses would be well ordered by a capable house-mistress, cold and uninterested, when the Professor, who seemed to be in no hurry, set her free to assume her duties as wife.
Oddly enough, Lossie seemed the happiest of the three, and having made her supreme appeal to Carlton, had apparently forgotten all about it. She met him without embarrassment, was friendly without effort—sometimes he rubbed his eyes, and thought he must have dreamed that vivid scene with her in Gay's den; yet he found himself thinking of it more often as time went on, and sometimes searched her intensely blue eyes for even a trace of the memory of it. But he found none—if Lossie, indeed, were playing a game, she played it magnificently well.
She neither sought nor avoided him, was quite pleasant, but profoundly indifferent, when they met at Connaught Square or elsewhere, and, most damning proof of all that she had ceased to value his opinion, permitted herself slight lapses in manner, and carelessnesses in dress before him. She even yawned occasionally in his face, treating him, as he said angrily to himself, like some damned old woman rather than the man whom she most wished to please—but did she?
He came to the conclusion that her outbreak had been a fit of nerves, combined with an interested desire to share his very handsome fortune, and that having failed, she thought no more about him, but decided to turn her attention elsewhere, the opportunity for doing so occurring very shortly after his own engagement.
For the unexpected had happened. Mrs. Elkins was being dressed by her maid to go to her lawyers, there to sign a fresh will she had made, by which she left everything to her favourite of the moment, and away from George Conant, who had annoyed her, when in the mirror, the woman saw the old lady's face contorted, terrible, with the most ghastly look of fear in her eyes, and though she struggled and fought dumbly for hours, she never spoke again.