"Laura!" cried Geraldine indignantly, "if you dare to interfere, in the smallest degree, with this business, I shall never speak to you again."
"My dear Geraldine!"
"Remember that, Laura, and remember that I mean what I say. I will not permit so much as the faintest hint of anything I have told you."
"My dearest girl, I pledge myself not to speak one word," protested Lady
Laura, very much, alarmed by her sister's indignation.
Geraldine left her soon after this, vexed with herself for having betrayed so much feeling, even to a sister; left her—not to repose in peaceful, slumbers, but to walk up and down her room till early morning, and look out at daybreak on the Castle gardens and the purple woods beyond, with a haggard face and blank unseeing eyes.
George Fairfax meanwhile had lain himself down to take his rest in tolerable good-humour with himself and the world in general.
"I really think I behaved very well," he said to himself; "and having made up my mind to stop anything like a flirtation with that perilously fascinating Clarissa, I shall stick to my resolve with the heroism of an ancient Roman; though the Romans were hardly so heroic in that matter, by the way—witness the havoc made by that fatal Egyptian, a little bit of a woman that could be bundled up in a carpet—to say nothing of the general predilection for somebody else's wife which prevailed in those days, and which makes Suetonius read like a modern French novel. I did not think there was so much of the old leaven left in me. My sweet Clarissa! I fancy she likes me—in a sisterly kind of way, of course—and trusts me not a little. And yet I must seem cold to her, and hold myself aloof, and wound the tender untried heart a little perhaps. Hard upon both of us, but I suppose only a common element in the initiatory ordinances of matrimony."
And so George Fairfax closed his eyes and fell asleep, with the image of Clarissa before him in that final moment of consciousness, whereby the same image haunted him in his slumbers that night, alternately perplexing or delighting him; while ever and anon the face of his betrothed, pale and statue-like, came between him and that other face; or the perfect hand he had admired at chess that night was stretched out through the darkness to push aside the form of Clarissa Lovel.
That erring dreamer was a man accustomed to take all things lightly; not a man of high principle—a man whose best original impulses had been weakened and deadened not a little by the fellowship he had kept, and the life he had led; a man unhappily destined to exercise an influence over others disproportionate to the weight of his own character.
Lady Laura was much disturbed by her sister's confidence; and being of a temperament to which the solitary endurance of any mental burden is almost impossible, immediately set to work to do the very things which would have been most obnoxious to Geraldine Challoner. In the first place she awakened her husband from comfortable slumbers, haunted by no more awful forms than his last acquisition in horseflesh, or the oxen he was fattening for the next cattle-show; and determinedly kept him awake while she gave him a detailed account of the distressing scene she had just had with "poor Geraldine."