“No, dear. I only told her that I had a very nice niece moping at the hotel, and very tired of my dismal company.”
“Tired of you? No, no, aunt. You know better than that. I should no more grow tired of you than I should of Box,” intending to make the most flattering comparison; “only he had made himself a part of our lives at Pallanza, don’t you know, and one could not help missing him.” (The pronoun meant Castellani, and not the dog.) “I am glad I am going to the opera after all, even if it does remind me of him; and it’s awfully kind of Lady Lochinvar to send her carriage for me. I only waited to see you before I began to dress.”
“Go, dearest; and take care to look your prettiest.”
“And you won’t mind dining alone?”
“I shall be delighted to know you are enjoying yourself.”
The prospect of an evening’s solitude was an infinite relief to Mildred. She breathed more freely when Pamela had gone dancing off to the lift, a fluffy, feathery mass of whiteness, with hooded head and rosy face peeping from a border of white fox. The tall door of the salon closed upon her with a solemn reverberation, and Mildred was alone with her own thoughts, alone with the history of her husband’s past life, now that she had unravelled the tangled skein and knew all.
She was face to face with the past, and how did it seem in her eyes? Was there no doubt, no agonising fear that the man she had loved as a husband might have slain the girl she had loved as a sister? All those people, those simple and disinterested villagers, who had liked George Ransome well enough for his own sake, had yet believed him guilty: they who had been on the spot, and had had the best opportunities for judging the case rightly.
Could she doubt him, she who had seen honour and fine feeling in every act of his life? She remembered the dream—that terrible dream which had occurred at intervals; sometimes once in a year; sometimes oftener; that awe-inspiring dream which had shaken the dreamer’s nerves as nothing but a vision of horror could have shaken them, from which he had awakened more dead than alive, completely unnerved, cold drops upon his pallid brow, his hands convulsed and icy, his eyes glassy as death itself. The horror of that dream even to her, who beheld its effect on the dreamer, was a horror not to be forgotten.
Was it the dream of a murderer, acting his crime over again in that dim world of sleep, living over again the moment of his temptation and his fall? No, no! Another might so interpret the vision, but not his wife.
“I know him,” she repeated to herself passionately; “I know him. I know his noble heart. He is incapable of one cruel impulse. He could not have done such a deed. There is no possible state of feeling, no moment of frenzy, in which he would have been false to his character and his manhood.”