The men made an early start, and from one of her bedroom windows Mrs. Maule watched the dogcart spinning down the broad road through the park. Dick Wantele was driving; Hew Lingard sitting stiffly, with folded arms, by his side.
At last they turned the corner at the end of the avenue, and Athena went back to bed with the feeling that it was pleasant to know that she need not get up for another two hours, and also that, after her talk with Jane Oglander, she would be free to do what she liked all day.
As she lay back, feeling a little stupid and drowsy, for she had taken a dose of chloral the night before, Athena gave a regretful, kindly thought to Bayworth Kaye.
Yes, though no one knew it but herself, the gods had shown the young man that kindness which is said to prove their love. His only fault as a lover—a serious one from Mrs. Maule's point of view—had been an almost insane jealousy. He would have taken badly, perhaps very badly, her marriage to such a man as General Lingard.
It was well for Bayworth, and, in a lesser sense, well for her also, that he had died in this sad, sudden way. Death is the only final, as it is the only simple, solution of many a painful riddle.
Athena had not allowed the thought of Bayworth Kaye to trouble her unduly; but she had been uncomfortably aware that he might remain, for a long time, a point of danger in her life. She acknowledged that in the matter of this young man she had been imprudent, but he had come across her at a moment when she was feeling dull and "under the weather."
Poor Bayworth! He had taken the whole thing far too seriously. He had been so young, so ardent, so—so grateful. His death at this juncture was a relief. Athena paid his memory the tribute of a sigh.
And then she turned her thoughts to Jane Oglander. During the last few years she had had many proofs of Jane's deep and loyal affection for herself; but the type of woman to which Mrs. Maule belonged can never form any true intimacy with a member of her own sex.
Jane had always been ignorant of everything that concerned Athena's real inward life—the vivid, exciting, emotional life, which she lived when away from Rede Place. Bayworth Kaye had been the one exception to the wise rule she had made for herself very soon after her arrival in England.
Jane Oglander, so Athena was quite convinced, knew nothing of the greatest of the great human games—had never fallen a victim to that jealous, compelling passion which plays so tragic a part in the lives of most of those sentient human beings who are not absorbed in one of the other master-passions.