She remembered them all, and they kept blotting out the picture of Roger as she had so often seen him—big and bronzed by the sun—when he came striding over the cliffs to Mallow Court. The memory was like a hand holding her back from casting in her lot with him.
And then the pendulum swung back and she felt that to marry—someone, anyone—was the only thing left to her. She was frightened of her love for Peter. Marriage, she argued, would be—must be—a shield and buckler against the cry of her heart. If she were married she would be able to stifle her love, crush it out, behind those solid, unyielding bars of conventional wedlock.
The fact of Peter's own marriage seemed to her rather dream-like. There lay the danger. They had never met until after his wife had left him, so that her impression of him as a married man was necessarily a somewhat vague and shadowy one.
But there would be nothing vague or shadowy about marriage with Trenby! That Nan realised. And, utterly weary of the persistent struggle in her heart, she felt that it might cut the whole tangle of her life once and for all if she passed through the strait and narrow gate of matrimony into the carefully shepherded fold beyond it. After all, most women settled down to it in course of time, whether their husbands came up to standard or not. If they didn't, the majority of wives contrived to put up with the disappointment, and probably she herself would be so fully occupied with the putting up part of the business that she would not have much time in which to remember Peter.
But perhaps, had she known the inner thoughts of those women who have been driven into the "putting up" attitude towards their husbands, she would have realised that memories do not die so easily.
CHAPTER XI
GOING WITH THE TIDE
As Nan, who had reluctantly complied with Kitty's stern decree that she must rest in bed during the greater part of the following day, at last descended from her room, she discovered, much to her satisfaction, that her ankle had ceased to pain her. But she still felt somewhat stiff and sore after the knocking about of the previous day.
At dinner she was astonished to find that the house-party had decreased by one. Ralph Fenton was absent.
"He left for town this morning, by the early train from St. Wennys Halt," explained Kitty. "He was—was called away very suddenly," she added blandly, in answer to Nan's surprised enquiries.