"Oh, Judy, little Judy!" she sobbed. "Oh, Judy, what shall I do? My pain is greater than I can bear."
She knelt in this position for a long time. Her little sister's face was distinctly seen in her mental vision; Judy seemed surrounded by a sort of halo—but what of Jasper? Had all the love which united these two hearts vanished like a dream? Was he never coming back to her? Would he always misunderstand her? Oh, if she thought that, she would not stay with him—she would go back to the Rectory and to Judy, and forget her golden dream and turn back again to the old life. For three months she would have been a wife. She would forget that time. She would own to Jasper that she had made a mistake. She would be Hilda Merton once more. Alas! alas! that could not be. Vows and ceremonies tied her. She had stood beside the altar and given herself away. There was no going back on that step. Jasper was not the Jasper of her dreams. He must have a small mind not to understand Judy, and she had married him because she thought his mind so big and his heart so great. After all, Judy was far greater than Jasper.
"My little Judy," she murmured again, and then she sank down a pitiable, weak, inconsolable figure on the hearth-rug close to the expiring fire. She thought over the scenes of the last night and longed to have them back again.
"If Judy's arms were round me, I should not feel so lonely," she murmured. "Oh, Jasper, how can you turn from me? How can you fail to understand that my heart at least is big enough to love both Judy and you?"
The lamp burnt dimly and the fire went completely out. Hilda presently fell asleep in the darkness, and now a moonbeam shining into the drawing room and falling across her tired face made it look white and unearthly, almost like the face of a dead girl. It was in this attitude that Quentyns found her when he came back somewhere between one and two o'clock.
His conscience was reproaching him, for Rivers, an old friend, had not failed to give him a little spice of his mind; but he was just in that irritable condition where repentance is almost impossible, and when self-abasement only leads a man into further wrong-doing.
When he saw Hilda's tired face, he said to himself with a sort of laugh:
"If I don't encourage this sort of thing, I shall doubtless be more and more of a tyrant in the eyes of my good wife and that precious fastidious child and Rivers. Well, well, I cannot see the beauty of voluntary martyrdom. If Hilda weren't quite such a goose, she would have gone to bed two hours ago, instead of falling asleep here to the utter disregard of her health and personal appearance."
So Quentyns, looking cross and uninterested, shook his wife not too gently; spoke in a commonplace tone, out of which he purposely excluded every scrap of emotion, and asked her how much longer she wanted to sit up.
Hilda stumbled to her feet without a word. She went upstairs and to bed, but although her husband quickly slept, she lay awake until the morning.