It was only for a moment, but in that moment the two men saw clearly. It was as if the veil from the girl's mind had fallen—leaving her thoughts confessed, bare before them. In the same instant they both saw—they both sped back in thought to their first meeting, to the hundred links of the chain that brought them to the present moment—they KNEW; and Millicent felt that they knew.
“Are YOU going to be married to-morrow?” asked Guy Oscard deliberately. He never was a man to whom a successful appeal for the slightest mitigation of justice could have been made. His dealings had ever been with men, from whom he had exacted as scrupulous an honour as he had given. He did not know that women are different—that honour is not their strong point.
Millicent did not answer. She looked to Meredith to answer for her; but Meredith was looking at Oscard, and in his lazy eyes there glowed the singular affection and admiration which he had bestowed long time before on this simple gentleman—his mental inferior.
“Are YOU going to be married to-morrow?” repeated Oscard, standing quite still, with a calmness that frightened her.
“Yes,” she answered rather feebly.
She knew that she could explain it all. She could have explained it to either of them separately, but to both together, somehow it was difficult. Her mind was filled with clamouring arguments and explanations and plausible excuses; but she did not know which to select first. None of them seemed quite equal to this occasion. These men required something deeper, and stronger, and simpler than she had to offer them.
Moreover, she was paralysed by a feeling that was quite new to her—a horrid feeling that something had gone from her. She had lost her strongest, her single arm: her beauty. This seemed to have fallen from her. It seemed to count for nothing at this time. There is a time that comes as surely as death will come in the life of every beautiful woman—a time wherein she suddenly realises how trivial a thing her beauty is—how limited, how useless, how ineffectual!
Millicent Chyne made a little appealing movement towards Meredith, who relentlessly stepped back. It was the magic of the love that filled his heart for Oscard. Had she wronged any man in the world but Guy Oscard, that little movement—full of love and tenderness and sweet contrition—might have saved her. But it was Oscard's heart that she had broken; for broken they both knew it to be, and Jack Meredith stepped back from her touch as from pollution. His superficial, imagined love for her had been killed at a single blow. Her beauty was no more to him at that moment than the beauty of a picture.
“Oh, Jack!” she gasped; and had there been another woman in the room that woman would have known that Millicent loved him with the love that comes once only. But men are not very acute in such matters—they either read wrong or not at all.
“It is all a mistake,” she said breathlessly, looking from one to the other.