"Mrs. Milbanke," he asked, "is it true that when you dare an Irishwoman to do a certain thing, that thing is as good as done?"
Clodagh's lashes fluttered, and she coloured hotly; then with the naïve defiance, the intoxication of youthful assurance, she lifted her eyes again and gave another bright, clear laugh.
"Two unanswered questions should be as good as one reply!" she said, looking straight into his face.
All that day Clodagh went about her concerns with a delightful, furtive sense of things to come. In the evening she came down to dinner arrayed in a dress of lace and embroidery that had come from Vienna only three weeks before. The dress possessed sweeping lines that defined her slight figure; and above the jewelled lace of the bodice her graceful shoulders, smooth as ivory, and as warm in tone, showed bare of any ornament. The faint olive of her skin was enriched by the neutral colour of her dress, and in the bright light of the hotel rooms, the underlying gleam of gold was distinctly visible in her brown hair. Her whole appearance as she entered the dining-room was subtly attractive; and in every detail of her expression pleasure and anticipation gleamed like tangible things. From the colour that wavered in her cheeks to the dilated pupils that turned her eyes from hazel to black, she was the embodiment of eager expectation.
Neither Deerehurst, Serracauld, nor Barnard dined at the hotel that night, but from the eyes of more than one stranger she read the assurance that she had not arrayed herself in vain; and youthfully conscious of a subtle, impersonal success, her eager spirits rose high.
Regardless of Milbanke's monosyllabic answers, she kept up a stream of conversation; and at last, when she rose with the general company, she did not leave the room, but paused with her hand on the back of his chair.
"I am going for my cloak, James," she said. "Mr. Barnard is to call for me. Shall we say good-night now?" Her face, as she bent forward, leaning over his shoulder, was filled with a bright preoccupation.
The scene was no new one—nor was its lesson new. It merely expounded the eternal disparity between the present generation and the past. On the one hand, was the patient surrender of the being who has known life with its poor compensations and its tardy requitals; on the other, the impatience, the ardour, the egotism of the being who longs to understand, to tear the bandage from his blind, curious eyes, to shake the fetters from his eager, groping hands. It was a scene that is enacted every day of every year by fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. A scene in which, daily and yearly, a merciful nature mitigates the tragic truth by means of a blessed sanity—an instinctive renunciation. But this was no case for natural healing balm; this was no case of father and daughter, but of husband and wife.
"Shall we say good-night?" Clodagh asked again.
Milbanke started and looked up; and something in her warm beauty—something in her gracious youth affected him.