She got up and, moving across to the window, stood looking out. Below, the pleasant, happy-go-lucky garden rambled desultorily away to the corner where stood the ancient oak supporting Ann’s hammock—a garden of odd, unexpected nooks and lawns, with borders of old English flowers, without definite form and looking as if it had grown of its own sweet will into its present comeliness. But the garden conjured up before Cara’s mental vision was a very different one—a stately, formal garden entered through an arch of jessamine, with a fountain playing in its centre, tinkling coolly into a marble basin, and a high-backed, carved stone bench set beneath the shade of scented trees. Above all pulsated the deep, sapphire blue of an Italian sky.
The pictured garden faded and Cara turned slowly back into the room. Her eyes looked sad.
“Poor Eliot!” she said. “It’s all ancient history now. But one wishes it was possible to give him back his happiness.”
When she had gone, Ann lay thinking over the story she had just heard. So it was all true, then—the tale that Eliot had been jilted years ago! It threw a vivid flash of illumination on the many complexities she had come up against in his character. The two women who should mean most in a man’s life had both failed him. He bore on his body a scar which surely he must never see reflected in the mirror without recalling the travesty of motherhood that was all he had ever known. And scored into his soul, hidden beneath a bitter reticence and unforgiving cynicism, lay the still deeper scar of that hurt which the woman who was to have been his wife had dealt him.
Ann’s annoyance with him because he hadn’t troubled to call personally to ascertain how she was melted away in a rush of pitying comprehension. She was conscious of an intense anger against that unknown woman who had so marred his life. She hoped she was being made to pay for it, suffer for it in some way!
And then, all at once, came the realisation that if she had remained faithful, Eliot would probably have been married years ago ... she herself would never have met him.... A burning flush mounted to her very temples, and she hid her face in her hands, trying to shut out the swift, unbidden thought which had wakened within her a strange tumult of emotion. When at last she uncovered her face, her eyes held the wondering, startled look of a young fawn.
She was very young and whole-hearted, utterly innocent of that great miracle which transforms the world, as yet unrecognising of the voice of love—the Voice which, once heard, can never again be muted and forgotten. And now something stirred within her—something new and disturbing and a little frightening.
It was as though she had heard some distant call which she but half understood and, only partly understanding, feared.