He rode over to the Park on the afternoon of his return, and found Bella alone, yawning over a novel. She started and dropped her book when the footman announced him, and changed from pale to red, and red to pale again.
‘You did not expect to see me so soon,’ said the captain, keeping her little cold hand in his.
‘No,’ she faltered, unable to say more.
‘You thought I should be able to endure a fortnight’s life without you. I was fool enough to think so too—and made all my arrangements for staying away till the 27th. But three days were quite enough. How pale and tired you look!’
‘I have had nothing to do, and I suppose that is the most tiring thing in the world. Tina has gone home. I did not want Mr. Piper to think that she was going to live here always.’
‘What does it matter what he thinks?’ said Captain Standish, with his supercilious smile. ‘Mr. Piper was only created to be useful to you and your relations. And so you have missed—Tina.’
‘I have been very dull.’
‘If you knew how desolate my life was in those three days you would pity me,’ said the captain, tenderly. ‘Yes, Isabel, you would pity me for being so weak that I cannot live without you, so miserably placed that I am obliged to hide my love.’
And then Captain Standish went on to tell his story; the old, old story, the familiar melody, subject to such endless variations, such kaleidoscopic distinctions without difference, and always coming to the same thing in the end. ‘We might have been happy had Providence willed it. Let us defy Providence, fling honour to the winds, and be happy in spite of fate.’
He talked and pleaded for a long time, and Bella listened with lowered eyelids, and lowered head, and let her hand lie locked in his, and did not answer his specious arguments by one straight outspoken denial. She paltered with this tempter, as she had paltered with temptation all her life, always choosing the road she liked best. She said neither yes nor no. It was an awful thing that he was asking her to do. No more nor less than to surrender honour, social status, everything for his sake, to go to Italy with him, and live a gay, unfettered life there, among people who, according to his showing, would be willing to accept her as his wife. He painted the picture of that ideal Italian life so vividly that all the hideousness of his proposal was lost sight of under that bright colouring.