Grace looked back, in many a happy reverie, and recalled that year before the beginning of the scandal, when the man who was now her impassioned lover had seemed to her cold and distant. Only by his seriousness in seeking her society, his grave pleasure in ministering to her love of books, and bringing her in touch with the choicest things in contemporary literature, could Lady Perivale discover that his friendship was any more than the admiring regard which every intelligent man must needs feel for a young and beautiful woman who is also intelligent. Much as Haldane admired beauty—from its spiritual essence in a picture by Burne-Jones, to its earthliest form in a Roman flower-girl on the steps below the Church of the Trinity—his affections would never have been taken captive by beauty allied with silliness. He was a man to whom community of thought was an essential element in love. And, in Grace Perivale, he had discovered mind and imagination in sympathy with his own thoughts and dreams; and he was completely happy in her company, happy to be her friend, yet hesitating to become her lover, till, in some future day, her intimate knowledge of his character might make it impossible for her to misread his motives.
And then had come the bitter blow, when he, who had tortured himself with jealous apprehensions of her liking for Colonel Rannock, heard the story of those chance meetings in the South.
He had been vehement in his denunciation of the slander. If the story were so far true that she was the person who had been seen with Rannock, could any one who knew her doubt for a moment that he had a legal right to her company, that they had been quietly married, and, for some reason of their own, chose to delay the publication of their marriage.
He was laughed at for his vehemence, and for his simplicity.
"Did you never hear of a woman throwing her cap over the mill?" asked his friend. "Have you lived so long in a civilized world, and don't you know that women are always doing the most unexpected things? Have you known no delicately-reared woman take to the gin-bottle and drink herself to death? Have you never heard of the household angel—the devoted wife and mother—who, after twenty years of honourable wedlock, went off with her daughter's Italian singing-master? And these rich women are the very sort who go wrong. Their opulence demoralizes them. They are petty Cleopatras, and pine for the fierce passion of a Cæsar or a Marc Antony."
There was not much stirring in London in the early part of that season, and the scandal about Lady Perivale was dinned into Haldane's ears wherever he went. Young women talked about it, in allusive speech, with a pretence of naïveté. What was the story? They pretended not to know what it all meant; but they knew their mothers were not going to call upon her ever again; so they opined that it must be something very dreadful, considering the sort of people their mothers went on visiting and entertaining season after season. It must be something worse than the things that were said about Lady Such-and-Such, or even about Mrs. So-and-So.
Haldane heard, and the iron entered into his soul; and he held himself aloof from the woman he loved, fearing, doubting, waiting.
"If that man appears upon the scene I shall know it's all over," he thought.
He walked from his rooms in Jermyn Street to Grosvenor Square every night, and paced the pavements within view of Lady Perivale's windows, steering clear of the houses where there were parties, with awnings, and blocks of bystanders, and policemen, and linkmen. He saw the lighted windows of the morning-room, and sometimes saw a graceful shadow flit across the blind, and knew that she was there, and alone. No masculine form ever passed between the lamp and the windows. Susan Rodney appeared there once or twice a week, and he sometimes saw her driven away in a humble four-wheeler, on the stroke of eleven. But the figure he feared to see never crossed the threshold.