“Wait till you’re tempted,” he said shortly. “Wait till what you want wars against what you ought to have—what you’ve the right to take.”
For a moment she made no answer. Put bluntly like that, the matter suddenly presented itself to her as one of the poignant possibilities of life. Supposing—supposing such a choice should ever be demanded of her? She felt a vague fear catch at her heart, an indefinable dread.
When at last she spoke, the eyes she lifted to meet Tor-marin’s were troubled. In them he could read the innate honesty which was prepared to face the question he had raised, and behind that—courage. A young, untried courage, not sure of itself, it is true, but still courage that only waited till some call should wake it into fighting actuality.
“I hope,” she said with a wistful humility that was rather touching, “I hope I should stick it out One’s ideals, and duty, and other people’s rights—it would be horrible to scrap the lot—just for love.”
“Worth it, perhaps. You”—his voice was the least bit uneven—“you haven’t been up against love—yet.”
Again she was conscious of that little catch at her heart—the same convulsive tightening of the muscles as one experiences when a telegram is put into one’s hand which may, or may not, contain bad news.
“You haven’t been up against love yet.”
The words recalled her knowledge of the tragic episode that lay in Tormarin’s own past. The whole history she did not know—only the odds and ends of gossip which one woman had confided to another. But here, in the man’s curt brevity of speech, surely lay proof that he had suffered. And if he had suffered, it followed that he must have cared deeply for the woman who had thrown him aside for the sake of another man.
Jean’s first generous impulse of pity as she realised this was strangely intermingled with a fleeting disquiet, a subconscious sense of loss. It was only momentary, and not definite enough for her to express in words, even to herself—hardly more than the slightly blank sensation produced upon anyone sitting in the sunshine when a cloud suddenly intervenes and drops a shadow where a moment before there has been warmth and light.
An instant later it was overborne by her spontaneous sympathy for the man beside her, and, recognising the rather painful similarity between her father’s treatment of Judith Craig and the story she had heard of the unknown woman’s treatment of Tormarin himself, she tactfully deflected the conversation to something that would touch him less closely, launching into a description of the life her parents had led at Beirnfels.