Clare heard this sudden announcement with surprise, and regarded Jerry's face earnestly.
CHAPTER XVII.
A QUARREL.
But one idea or conviction, prevailed in the mind of Jerry Vane:
'She who was so readily false to me before, may easily be so again!'
If he slept at all that night, his sleep was but a succession of nightmares, with dreams such as might spring from a slumber procured by the mandragora; one aching thought ever recurring amid the darkness of the waking hours, and all the more keenly when morning came, and he knew that he must inexorably see and talk with Ida in the usual commonplace way before others, ere he left her for ever, and quitted Carnaby Court to return no more.
The tortures he had endured he resolved never to endure again. It should never be in the power of Ida or any other woman to place her heel upon his heart and crush it, as she had crushed it twice!
Yet when he saw her at the breakfast-table, in all her fresh morning loveliness, and in the most becoming demi-toilette, with her gorgeous hair so skilfully manipulated by her maid, and her grave, chastely beautiful face rippling with a kind—almost fond—smile, as if greeting him and asking his forgiveness too, he knew not what to think, but strove to steel himself against her for the future.
She had a newly gathered white rose—his flower, she was wont to call it—in her bosom; and that rose was not whiter than the slender neck round which the frills of tulle were clasped by a tiny coral brooch.
At times, when he looked on her, and heard the steadiness of her musical voice and sweet silvery little laugh, and beheld the perfect ease of her manner and the candour of her eyes, he could have imagined the affair in the garden to have been a dream, but for the strange and conscious smile that hovered in the face of Desmond when he addressed Ida, while making a hurried breakfast before his departure for London.