For a moment, as he had driven by quickly in a dogcart belonging to his late host, and therefore unfamiliar to Penelope and her companion, he had caught a look—an unguarded, unmasked, passionate look—on Winfrith's strong, plain face.
What glance, what word on his companion's part, had brought it there? That Winfrith should allow himself to be thus moved angered Wantley. He set himself to recall very deliberately certain things that his mother, acting with strange lack of good feeling, had told him, when he was still a boy, concerning Lady Wantley's mother, Penelope's grandmother. He wondered if Penelope knew. On the whole he thought not. But in any case, who could doubt from whom she had had transmitted to her that uncanny power of bewitching men, of keeping them faithful to herself, while she remained, or at least so he felt persuaded, quite unaffected by the passions she delighted in unloosing?
In his own mind, and not for the first time, he judged his cousin very hardly. And yet, after that evening, Wantley never thought so really ill of her again, for, when he felt tempted to do so, he seemed to hear the words which he had heard said that day for the first, though by no means for the last, time: 'Why are you—what makes you—so unfair to Penelope?'
And even as he walked through the sleeping, silent house he reminded himself, repentantly, that his cousin's love-compelling power extended to what was already to him the best and purest, as it was so soon to be the dearest, thing on earth.
CHAPTER IX
'La Passion, c'est l'ascétisme profâne, aussi rude que ascétisme religieux.'—Anatole France.
I
Within two hours of his curious conversation with his cousin, Wantley saw Mrs. Robinson and Cecily Wake start off, alone, for Shagisham.