"Will you kiss me—just once, Nan?" he said. "I don't think Mallory would grudge it me."
She bent over him, and for the first time unshrinkingly and with infinite tenderness, laid her lips on his. Then very quietly she left the room.
She was conscious of a sense of awe. First Maryon, and now, to an even greater degree, Roger, had revealed some secret quality of fineness with which no one would have credited them.
"I shall never judge anyone again," she told Kitty later. "You can't judge people! I shall always believe that everyone has got a little patch of goodness somewhere. It's the bit of God in them. Even Judas Iscariot was sorry afterwards, and went out and hanged himself."
She was thankful when she came downstairs from Roger's bedroom to find that there was no one about. A meeting with Lady Gertrude at the moment would have been of all things the most repugnant to her. With a feeling of intense thankfulness that the thin, steel-eyed woman was nowhere to be seen, she stepped into the car and was borne swiftly down the drive. At the lodge, however, where the chauffeur had perforce to pull up while the lodge-keeper opened the gates, Isobel Carson came into sight, and common courtesy demanded that Nan should get out of the car and speak to her. She had been gathering flowers—for Roger's room, was Nan's involuntary thought—and carried a basket, full of lovely blossoms, over her arm.
In a few words Nan told her of her interview with Roger.
Isobel listened intently.
"I'm glad you were willing to marry him," she said abruptly, as Nan ceased speaking. "It was—decent of you. Because, of course, you were never in love with him."
"No," Nan acknowledged simply.
"While I've loved him ever since I knew him!" burst out Isobel. "But he's never looked at me, thought of me like that! Perhaps, now you're out of the way—" She broke off, leaving her sentence unfinished.