No answer.
"Don't mention Welshpool. I'm supposed to have come straight from London."
"Why should I say anything at all?"
"Oh! one never knows. Give me your hand on it."
What could she do? He was in no hurry to release her, and had hardly dropped it when, chilled and dazed but boisterously light-hearted after their mournful errand, her cousins entered the hall.
V
CICISPEO
The next morning was stirless but bracing. Snow covered the park in soft mounds and waves, with a little black pit round the roots of each tree, as though some hibernating animal were breathing beneath. The laden branches balanced their fairy load daintily, against a sky, low, buff-colored and heavy with the promise of a further fall toward afternoon. The atmosphere was so still that the shouts of children snowballing in the village half a mile beyond the lodge gates, the rattling of antlers round the feeding-trough, reached the terrace, swept and sand-strewn already, where Fenella walked before breakfast, her arms folded under a warm golfing cape that she had found hanging in the hall. In the morning light, austere, temperate and shadowless, a good many of the misgivings that had robbed her of sleep were re-examined and found ludicrously unworthy of the sacrifice. There was no mistake about it. She had had her hour of unreasoning panic—had even meditated excuses that should cover a precipitate homeward flight. But that mood was over now. Women have their own code of bravery in the only warfare they know—their own perception of the ignominy of flight. If they act oftener upon their fears than upon the braver impulse, it is only because, in this warfare, it is their adversary himself who has set the rules and poisoned the weapons, decreeing that the slightest wound as well as the mortal shall be held matter for shame.
"I've heard of you—from Dollfus." What did that mean? What could be said of her yet? Of course, afterward, she was prepared for far worse. She was going on the stage with her eyes remarkably wide open. But that women—girls like herself, living at home, protected and obscure—should be made subject of men's conversation, she felt was an injustice—a treacherous thrust before the battle was joined. What was its motive? To rob her of self-respect before her character could be assailed? To cheapen, degrade her in her own eyes at the outset?
All at once a light dawned upon her—a light that beamed softly through her eyes, that wreathed her lips with the faintest, saddest little smile that ever was near neighbor to tears.