At the age of seventeen, Jean came home to live at Beirnfels, thenceforward regarding her unpractical parents with a species of kindly tolerance and amusement. The three of them had lived quite happily together, though Jean had remained always the odd man out; but she had accepted the fact with a certain humorous philosophy which robbed it of half its sting.
Then, two years later, Jacqueline had developed rapid consumption, and though Glyn hurried her away to Montavan, in the Swiss Alps, there had been no combating the disease, and the romance of a great love had closed down suddenly into the grey shadows of death.
Peterson had been like a man demented. For a time he had disappeared, and no one ever knew, either then or later, how he had first faced the grim tragedy which had overtaken him.
Jean had patiently awaited his return to Beirnfels. When at last he came, he told her that it was the most beautiful thing which could have happened—that Jacqueline should, have died in the zenith of their love.
“We never knew the downward swing of the pendulum,” he explained. “And when we meet again it will be as young lovers who have never grown tired. I shall always remember Jacqueline as still perfectly beautiful—never insulted by old age. And when she thinks of me—well, I’m still a ‘personable’ fellow, as they say——”
“My dear Glyn, you’re still a boy! You’ve never grown up,” Jean made answer. To her he seemed a sort of Peter Pan among men.
She had been amazed—although in a sense relieved—to find how swiftly he had rallied. It seemed almost as though his intense loathing of the onset of old age and decay, of that slow cooling of passion and gradual decline of faculties which age inevitably brings, had served to reconcile him to the loss of the woman he had worshipped whilst yet there had been no dimming of her physical perfection, no blunting of the fine edge of their love.
It was easily comprehensible that to two such temperamental, joy-loving beings as Glyn and Jacqueline, England, with her neutral-tinted skies and strictness of convention, had made little appeal, and Jean could with difficulty harmonise the suddenly projected visit to England with her knowledge of her father’s idiosyncrasies.
It was just possible of course, since all which had meant happiness to him lay buried in a little mountain cemetery in Switzerland, that it no longer mattered to Peterson where he sojourned. One place might be as good—or as bad—as another.
Rather diffidently Jean voiced her doubts, recalling him from the reverie into which he had fallen.