"They were my husband's friends, and I am very glad for them to shoot his birds. Poor Hector! I always think of the birds and the moor as his still—the cruel moor that cost him his life."
Her eyes clouded as she spoke of her husband. Commonplace and kindly, a homely figure in the drama of life, he had been her first and only lover, her faithful and devoted husband, and, after three years of mourning, regret was not lessened. Colonel Rannock talked again of her house-party. He was going to Iceland to shoot things, and to live under canvas in unconceivable roughness and discomfort. He spoke with bitterness of a joyless holiday, and then, as if on the impulse of the moment, confessed his passion, his jealous rage at the thought of her surrounded by other men, and asked her to be his wife.
This was his first throw of the dice. She rejected him with a kindly firmness which she thought would settle the question for ever. He promised that it should be so. He would be content to know himself her friend, and so he went off to Iceland without further murmuring.
History repeated itself next season, when people were beginning to wonder why she did not marry him—nay, even to say that she ought to marry him. Mr. Howard was in China, on a diplomatic mission, so there was no prophet in Israel to warn her of coming evil. In this year Colonel Rannock offered himself to her twice, and was twice refused; but even after the third disappointment, he declared himself still her friend, and the concertante duets, and the dinners and suppers, at which he was her most brilliant talker, went on. And people said, "Dear Lady Perivale is so very unconventional."
CHAPTER IV.
"Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble."
Susan Rodney and her friend dined tête-à-tête, in a solemn splendour of butler and silk-stockinged footmen, and talked of music and the Opera. They spent the evening in Lady Perivale's sitting-room on the second floor, a delightful room, with three windows on a level with the tree tops in the square, and containing all her favourite books, her favourite etchings, her favourite piano, and her marron poodle's favourite easy-chair. The poodle was the choicest thing in ornamental dogs, beautiful exceedingly, with silken hair of the delicatest brown, and a face like a Lord Chief Justice, beautiful, but cold-hearted, accepting love, but hardly reciprocating, thinking nothing the world holds too good for him. Susan Rodney called him marron glacé.
Lady Perivale glanced at the drawing-rooms, and turned away with a faint shiver. Their spacious emptiness glittered with a pale brilliancy in the electric light.
"We shall be cosier in my den, Sue," she said; and they went upstairs together, and seated themselves in low, luxurious chairs, by tables loaded with roses and lilies of the valley.