"If you please, Mr. Haldane," cried Faunce, earnestly, "nothing of that kind! It is necessary that Lady Perivale should be publicly insulted, in order that she may be publicly justified. Nothing short of the appearance of the woman who was mistaken for her ladyship can give the lie direct to the scandal. I must beg, therefore, that the writer of the libel may be held secure from personal violence."
Haldane was silent. His fingers were itching for a stout malacca and for a scoundrel's back upon which to exercise it. He would have given so much to focus the malignant slander that had followed the woman he loved, and had made even him, her adoring lover, begin to doubt her, with a wavering faith of which he was now so deeply ashamed.
Oh, to have some one to punish with sharp physical pain, some craven hound to offer up as a sacrifice to his own remorse!
CHAPTER XII.
"In the mute August afternoon
They trembled to some undertune
Of music in the silver air;
Great pleasure was it to be there
Till green turned duskier and the moon
Coloured the corn-sheaves like gold hair."
The atmosphere of Grace Perivale's life was changed. John Faunce's keen eye for character had not erred in this particular case. Lady Perivale at Runnymede Grange was not the same woman the detective had conversed with in Grosvenor Square.
Happy love leaves no room for troubled thoughts in a woman's mind; and from the hour when Grace learnt that Arthur Haldane was her trusting and devoted lover, she began to forget the frivolous friends whose desertion she had so deeply resented. She forgot to be angry, because she had ceased to care. That outer world, the world of Mayfair and Belgravia, with its sordid interests and petty ambitions, the world of South African millionaires and new-made nobility, the world in which every smart personage was living in some other smart personage's house, and everybody who wasn't accredited with millions was suspected of being on the brink of insolvency; that élite, over-civilized and decadent world—dazzling and alluring in the phosphorescent radiance of decay—seemed so remote from all that makes happiness, that it could not be worth thinking about.
Her world now lay within so narrow a circle. Her world began and ended in a poet, critic, and romancer, whose dreams, thoughts, opinions, and aspirations, filled her mind to overflowing. He was her world, Arthur Haldane, the man of letters, to whom she was to be married as soon as this preposterous scandal was swept into the world's great ragbag of forgotten things.
The words had been spoken at last, words that had been in his heart two years ago, when Grace Perivale's beauty first flashed like sudden sunshine into the level grey of his life, and when he discovered that behind the beauty there was a brain and a heart.