"Come to River Mead for next Sunday. It will be my last week-end party before we go to Scotland," Lady Okehampton said to him before she bade good night. "Vera and Susan are coming. We shall be a small party, and there will be plenty of bridge."
Claude accepted the invitation as he took Lady Okehampton to her carriage.
"I wish Provana were not so much away from his wife," she said. "It is a very difficult position for Vera."
"Vera is not la première venue. She knows how to take care of herself."
"That's what they always say about women; but is it true in her case? She is very young, and rather simple, and knows very little of the world."
"Not after six years as the wife of a financial Crœsus?" murmured Claude, while he arranged the matron's voluminous mantle over her shoulders as carefully as if the outside atmosphere had been arctic.
He knew that the drift of her speech had been by way of warning for him. Dear, inconsistent soul! It was so like her to invite him to spend three days with her niece in the sans gêne of a riverside villa, and five minutes afterwards to sound a note of warning.
He walked along the lamp-lit streets with the light foot of triumphant love. Vera's pale distress and unwise questioning had set his heart beating with the presage of victory. Poor child! For his acute perceptions, the heart of a woman had seldom been a mystery, and this woman's heart was easier to read than most. Poor child! She had been trying to live without him. She had fought her poor little battle, with more of resolution and of courage than he would have expected from a creature so tender. She had kept him out of her life for a long time—time that had seemed an eternity for him, in his longing for her; and then, at a word, at a smile, at the touch of his hand, she had yielded, and had let him see that to be with him was to be happy, and that nothing else mattered. Light love had been his portion in the light years of youth; but this was no light love. He had sacrificed his career for the sake of a woman; but the sacrifice had been forced upon him, and it had killed his love. But now he was prepared for any sacrifice—for the sacrifice of life-long exile, and strained means. He thought of a home in a summer isle of the great southern ocean, like Stevenson's; or, if gaiety were better, in some romantic city of Spanish America. There were paradises enough in the world, there would be no one to point the finger of scorn, where "Society" was a word of no meaning.