Her soul-withdrawal from him was more justified, and of more moment and dignity than his from her. For once or twice she just glimpsed almost an antagonism, a seed of hatred—born of his writhing conscience—that was slowly cankering in his mind. That he should doubt the all-forgiveness of her love grieved her sorely, but she recognized that it certainly was involuntary, and probably was inevitable; but that, even so, he presumed to arraign her at the judgment seat of his peccant soul, blaming her that she could not forget, could not quite condone, incensed her bitterly.

The grave secret that they shared, and that no one else now of their world even suspected, linked them tightly—too tightly: the gyves hurt. And while it linked it separated. They were closer together than they had ever been before; closer than even a mother and son should be; closer than any two human creatures should be. They violated, with the hideousness of their mutual knowledge, each other’s utmost right of privacy—the soul-privacy which God and nature command that with each human entity shall be forever inviolable.

He suffered at her suffering. He brooded over her. He was very tender of his mother. But between them, and in them mutually, a poison worked. Their love was exquisite and human still; their companionship, and even their sympathy, warm and sincere. But a slight cloud hung over them, a cloud no bigger than a dead man’s hand. It grew a little darker every day.

CHAPTER XLIII
English Wedding Bells

BASIL Gregory’s wedding day was warm and clear. June and England were at their best.

It was a sweetly pretty wedding. Every one said so.

And the girlish bride was prettier than her wedding—prettier than any mere picture could be; as pretty and as sweet as the June roses she wore, and very like them: pink and white, delicate, fair-haired, violet-eyed Alice Lee, the motherless daughter of the incumbent of the old gray vicarage in which Basil Gregory’s mother had been born.

Homesick for the old days and the old ways, Florence Gregory had gone to Oxfordshire soon after their return to England, hoping to bathe and to heal her stained and torn spirit in the quiet of old places, the ointment of pure memories. She had failed. But she had made fast friends with her dead father’s successor, and had gone back to the cordial hospice of her old home again and again in the three years that had elapsed since she had come from China. A year ago Basil had accompanied her, none too willingly, for a week-end, had stayed a month; hence these wedding bells!

Florence Gregory was an old woman now, old and limp. Robert Gregory was no longer proud of his wife. Her white hair was very beautiful, but he resented it, and it rasped and angered him that she had prematurely aged. He had married her, as he had loved her, for her buoyant good looks, and he felt that he was defrauded by the change in her—a change so marked that even his careless and ledger-bound eyes could not fail to see it. And secretly his poor mundane spirit groaned aloud that his missus—the best-dressed woman in Hong Kong three years ago, and every bit as smart as her clothes—had degenerated into a frumpish nobody, looked older than he did, by the Lord Harry, and without an ounce of snap in her or a word to say to any one. Greatly to his credit, he had kept all this to himself loyally. He had never spoken of it, not even hinted at it, to any one, beyond plaintive and repeated entreaties to Hilda to help him find some way to buck Mother up. He had never been unkind to his wife. He still bought flowers for her—the bouquet she carried at their son’s wedding had cost five guineas—and burdened her with gifts of jewelry almost inappropriate to his means. And Mr. Gregory was growing very rich indeed. The wounds that “Mr. Wu” had dealt his fortune had soon healed, and left no scar. He was still a faithful husband. Such pride and consolation as a woman may take from the continence that is chiefly the outcome of a husband’s indifference to her sex and of his absorption in business and in self were Mrs. Gregory’s. And in all their married life they had had but one quarrel—a unique quarrel, as husbands and wives go. It had occurred two years ago, and had been over a dressmaker’s bill.