Anne turned to put her gloves on the table beside her. “Robin Adair, wasn’t it?” she asked quietly.
“Ah, yes, of course!” replied the old hypocrite.
Muriel glanced at Anne. “I wish,” she reflected with admiration, “that I could act as well. I nearly gave myself away just now, when they all descended on me like an avalanche. And I’d bet my bottom dollar Father O’Sullivan guessed something.” Which bet, if there had been any one to take her on, Muriel would certainly have won.
Anne, as she drove towards Chelsea half an hour later, wondered vaguely why she had asked General Carden to tea with her. Finally she decided that it was for the obvious reason that he wanted to come, and she would have been rude if she had not done so.
And Father O’Sullivan, as he walked home, ruminated on the tangled story Muriel had told him. It was only one of the many tangles in the world, and he knew it, but it had been brought [Pg 228]directly to his notice, and he had a very simple and perfect faith that the good God would unravel the knots in His own way and at His own time.
CHAPTER XXIII
DUM SPIRO, SPERO
You know how there are times in our lives when the days hang heavily, each moment dragging on leaden feet, weighted all the more grievously because we are ready to protest to our fellow-men, to ourselves perhaps, that the days are not grey, but each one as full of light as we would have it be. And if you do not know you are lucky. Or are you lucky? Are not the heavy clouds, which temporarily hide the golden sunshine, better than a dull monochrome of a life, in which neither cloud nor sunshine is existent? For is it not by the very brightness of the sun which has been, that we recognize the clouds which now obscure it? It is when the sun has never shone in its fullest splendour for us that we do not recognize the existence of the clouds, for to say that any life is passed in one unbroken dream of golden glory is to make a statement which one will dare to denounce as untrue. If there be the gold of joy, so there will come the clouds of sorrow, and a life without clouds is of necessity one without sun, a monochrome of a life, peaceful perhaps, but lacking in intensity.
The days passed slowly for Anne. They no longer went by with the gay carelessness of a year, six months, nay, only three months ago. Take an interest out of your life, however chary you may have been of admitting the existence of that interest to your secret heart, and then fill your days with gaiety, friends, books, anything and everything but the one thing you want, and you will find it a method of subtraction and addition which is apt to result in a distinctly unsatisfactory sum total.