“Why do I imagine a mystery about her?” she argued, after long brooding. “The only secret was that he loved her as he could never love me, and he feared to tell me as much lest I should refuse the remnant of a heart. It was out of kindness to me that he kept silence. It would have pained me too much to know how she had been loved.”
She knew that her husband was a man of exceeding sensitiveness; she knew him capable of almost woman-like delicacy. Was it altogether unnatural that such a man should have held back the history of his first marriage—with its passionate love, its heart-broken ending—from the enthusiastic girl who had given him all her heart, and to whom he could give so little in return?
“He may have seen how I loved him, and may have married me half out of pity,” she said to herself finally, with unspeakable bitterness.
Yet if this were so, could they have been so happy together, so completely united—save in that one secret of the past, that one dark regret which had revealed itself from time to time in an agonising dream? He had walked that dark labyrinth of sleep alone with his sorrow: there she could not follow him.
She remembered the awful sound of those broken sentences—spoken to shadows in a land of shadow. She remembered how acutely she had felt his remoteness as he sat up in bed, pale as death, his eyes open and fixed, his lips muttering. He and the dead were face to face in the halls of the past. She had no part in his life, or in his memory.
CHAPTER XII.
“SHE CANNOT BE UNWORTHY.”
Mr. Castellani did not wait long before he availed himself of Mrs. Greswold’s permission to repeat his visit. He appeared on Friday afternoon, at the orthodox hour of half-past three, when Mildred and her niece were sitting in the drawing-room, exhausted by a long morning at Salisbury, where they had explored the cathedral, and lunched in the Close with a clever friend of George Greswold’s, who had made his mark on modern literature.
“I adore Salisbury Close,” said Pamela, as she looked through the old-fashioned window to the old-fashioned garden; “it reminds me of Honoria.”
She did not deem it necessary to explain what Honoria she meant, presuming a universal acquaintance with Coventry Patmore’s gentle heroine.
The morning had been sultry, the homeward drive long, and both ladies were resting in comfortable silence, each with a book, when Castellani was announced.