It was late in the afternoon when the Mallow car once more purred up to the door of Trenby Hall and Nan descended from it. She was looking very pale, her face like a delicate white cameo beneath the shadow of her hat, while the clinging black of her gown accentuated the slender lines—too slender, now—of her figure. She had not yet discarded her mourning for Lord St. John, but in any case she would have felt that gay colours could have no part in to-day.
Kitty had told her of Barry's interview with Trenby and of its utter futility, and, although Nan had been prepared to sacrifice her whole existence to the man who had suffered so terrible an injury, she was bitterly disappointed that he proposed exacting it from her as a right rather than accepting it as a free gift.
If for once he could have shown himself generous and offered to give her back her freedom—an offer she would have refused to accept—how much the fact that each of them had been willing to make a sacrifice might have helped to sweeten their married life! Instead, Roger had forced upon her the realisation that he was unchanged—still the same arrogant "man with the club" that he had always been, insisting on his own way, either by brute force or by the despotism of a moral obligation which was equally compelling.
But these thoughts fled—driven away by a rush of overwhelming sympathy—when her eyes fell on the great, impotent hulk of a man who lay propped up against his pillows. A nurse slipped past her in the doorway and paused to whisper, as she went:
"Don't stay too long. He's run down a lot since this morning. I begged him not to see any more visitors to-day, but he insisted upon seeing you."
The nurse recalled very vividly the picture of her patient when she had endeavoured to dissuade him from this second interview—his white, rather drawn face and the eyes which blazed feverishly at her beneath their penthouse brows.
"You've got to let me see my best girl to-day, nurse," he had said, forcing a smile. "After that you shall have your own way and work your wicked will on me."
And the nurse, thinking that perhaps a visit from his "best girl" might help to allay the new restlessness she found in him, had yielded, albeit somewhat reluctantly.
"Oh, Roger!" With a low cry of dismay Nan ran to the bed and slipped down on her knees beside it.
"It's a rotten bit of luck, isn't it?" he returned briefly.