"Why, smitten with his pretty hostess—Mrs. Hepworth—the woman who calls herself Althea Rees, and writes rummy books. He stayed behind. I saw it arranged, like the fly, with my little eye. I finished the evening with Nick Templeton, who knows 'em well, and he says every one's expecting——Hello! here we are."
He held her hand again at parting, and this time she didn't snatch it away. Once inside the door, she returned a languid negative to the suggestion of lunch, and went upstairs to change her clothes and think over what she had just heard. First she cried a little, though nothing like as much as she had expected from the apparent weight at her heart; then, opening her trunk, she took out a leather box and emptied all his letters on to the hearth. So often, during that last lonely week by the sea, when she was hungering for news of him in vain, had she taken them down to the dunes to read, that there was almost a teaspoonful of fine sand at the bottom of the case. She had even been reading them over, she remembered, the day Bryan spoke to her first. She sat down on the hearth-rug, struck a match, and, crumbling each letter scientifically in her hand, burned piecemeal about half her little hoard from the wrecked past. Then she lost patience and locked the rest away. She was chilly; there had been no warmth in this sudden eager flame. She stretched herself and looked once more at her reflection in the long mirror. Her tears had thickened her features and throat. Something strangely, suddenly mature—some new adaptibility to life's sterner purposes—was looking back at her. She had wept—oh, how she had wept!—before, and yet only yesterday with her tears it had been the aspect of childhood that returned upon her. You would have said then: "There is a little girl who has broken her doll"; not until to-day: "There is a woman who has broken her heart." Was it so, indeed? Had it survived the first, the crueller blow, to break now at a piece of intelligence that was only to be looked for? Had there been hope, insane and unavowed? And why could she not hate him, as was her right? Why was it that only a brooding, yearning pity for him survived this final evidence of his faithlessness? Oh! it was because life was so hard on him—always would be so hard on him. Into whatever toils he had fallen, she could forgive him, because she knew he had not been seeking his own happiness when he fell. Just as she had never once conjectured concerning the old loves, so now she hazarded no guess as to the history of the new; but her woman's instinct, her appreciation of the nature by whose complexities her clear, sane common-sense had refused to be baffled, served her truly. It was still his compassion that sold him into new bondage—still his fatal fellowship with all that was weak, maimed or forsaken that, like a millstone round his neck, sunk him out of her sight. Hate him? Oh, what an uprush of smothered waters! What a tingling, as love like blood flowed back into her numbed heart, rebuked the suggestion! She reached out her arms to the mirror, and from its frozen depths, like an embodiment of all he had renounced in life—happiness, love, laughter, and ease of heart—the woman whom he had held shyly and awkwardly against his distracted heart, and whom to-morrow a thousand base eyes would covet, reached out her arms, too, in a mocking response.
"Oh, darling! why couldn't you trust me a little longer? Just because I couldn't say things, didn't I feel them? I was what you wanted most. Just because I was so different. Why weren't you a little patient with me, Paul?"
And now for her work. There was another rehearsal next week, but she couldn't wait. She would telephone Joe; have one called for Friday. They should see something then. She had a bit up her sleeve.
She was leaving her bedroom, humming over the first bars of her Chaconne, when she cannoned into the little maid who had replaced the irreproachable Druce. The sleeves of the girl's print dress were rolled up to her elbows, her cap awry.
"Frances, it's five o'clock. Why aren't you dressed?"
"Oh, miss! It's the missus."
"Your mistress? What's the matter with her?"
"Oh, miss, I dunno. She's a setting in the big armchair. It ain't sleep. Me nor cook can't rouse 'er, try 'ow we may. She's a moanin', too. I think it must be some kind of a stroke."