Daubeny had missed something responsive, he knew not what, in his wife, whose general listlessness, with a certain far-seeing expression of eye, began to pain and bewilder him. He kept his thoughts to himself; yet his brave and loving nature craved ever for some secret sympathy which Laura failed to accord him, and so there gradually began to yawn between them a chasm which neither could define, and the existence of which they would stoutly have denied. To Daubeny it became a source of keen and growing misery. But one night the scales fell from his eyes.
Finding himself alone and idle in London, he turned into the back stalls of the opera. The piece had not commenced; the orchestra were at the overture; the gas was somewhat low; and by some heedless fellows who were sitting in front of him he heard his own name mentioned once or twice in conversation, and was compelled to listen, thereto.
"Jack Westbrook has got over it all now," one said. "Of course the sting of wounded self-esteem, at being thrown over for rich old Phil Daubeny, rankled for a time. The fair Laura was his first love—never saw such a pair of spoons in all my life, don't you know—privately engaged, and all that sort of thing."
"And now I have no doubt she will flirt with any man who will flirt with her. Of course, it is always the way—and she don't care for Daubeny, poor devil!"
"I don't think she will flirt," said the first speaker.
"Bah! every woman has some weak point, if you can only find it out."
"Most men, too, I suspect; but the fair Laura is clad in the armour of virtue."
"Jack Westbrook might find some weak points in that armour, too; and he won't drop out of the hunt, perhaps."
Then followed a reckless laugh that stung the soul of Daubeny to madness. The Opera stalls were no place for that which is so abhorrent in "society"—a scene; so instead of dashing their heads together, as he felt inclined to do, he softly left the place just as the overture ceased and the act-drop rose; and he went forth in a tempest of that kind of rage which always becomes the more bitter for having no immediate object to expend itself on; and even the speed of the night express seemed a thousand degrees too slow as it bore him homeward to Craybourne Hall. She had been engaged, had a lover—her first lover, too—and all unknown to him!
He had both seen and heard of Westbrook; but not in this character. Her first love—her only love! How many uncounted kisses had, of course, been exchanged, of which he knew naught (and had no business with then)? How much of the bloom had been worn off the peach ere it became his? He was full of black wrath, and saw much now that he saw not before, and could quite account for all her coldness. Yet, although he knew it not, the girl who had always esteemed was now learning to love him as she had never even loved Jack Westbrook!