He met her fixed gaze, coldly.
"I have. I have said all I wish to say. So far as I am concerned the incident is closed. I will only bid you good-night—and farewell!"
"Good-night—and farewell!" she repeated, with a mocking drawl,—then she suddenly burst into a fit of shrill laughter. "Oh dear, oh dear!" she cried, between little screams of hysterical mirth—"You are so very funny, you know! Like—what's-his-name?—Marius in the ruins of Carthage!—or one of those antique classical bores with their household gods broken around them! You—you ought to have lived in their days!—you are so terribly behind the times!" She laughed recklessly again. "We don't do the Marius and Carthage business now—life's too full and too short! Really, Richard, I'm afraid you're getting very old!—poor dear!—past sixty I know!—and you're quite prehistoric in some of your fancies!—'Good-night!'—er—'and farewell!' Sounds so stagey, doesn't it!" She wiped the spasmodic tears of mirth from her eyes, and still shaking with laughter gathered up her rich ermine wrap on one white, jewelled arm. "Womanliness—motherliness!—good Lord, deliver us!—I never thought you likely to preach at me—if I had I wouldn't have told you anything! I took you for a sensible man of the world—but you are only a stupid old-fashioned thing after all! Good-night!—and farewell!"
She performed the taunting travesty of an elaborate Court curtsey and passed him—a handsome, gleaming vision of satins, laces and glittering jewels—and opening the door with some noise and emphasis, she turned her head gracefully over her shoulder. Unkind laughter still lit up her face and hard, brilliant eyes.
"Good-night!—farewell!" she said again, and was gone.
For a moment he stood inert where she left him—then sinking into a chair he covered his face with his hands. So he remained for some time—silently wrestling with himself and his own emotions. He had to realise that at an age when he might naturally have looked for a tranquil home life—a life tended and soothed into its natural decline by the care and devotion of the wife he had undemonstratively but most tenderly loved, he was suddenly cast adrift like the hulk of an old battleship broken from its moorings, with nothing but solitude and darkness closing in upon his latter days. Then he thought of the girl,—his wife's child—the child too of his college chum and dearest friend,—he saw, impressed like a picture on the cells of his brain, her fair young face, pathetic eyes and sweet intelligence of expression,—he remembered how modestly she wore her sudden fame, as a child might wear a wild flower,—and, placed by her parentage in a difficulty for which she was not responsible, she must have suffered considerable pain and sorrow.
"I will go and see her to-morrow," he said to himself—"It will be better for her to know that I have heard all her sad little history—then—if she ever wants a friend she can come to me without fear. Ah!—if only she were MY daughter!"
He sighed,—his handsome old head drooped,—he had longed for children and the boon had been denied.
"If she were my daughter," he repeated, slowly—"I should be a proud man instead of a sorrowful one!"
He turned off the lights in the library and went upstairs to his bedroom. Outside his wife's door he paused a moment, thinking he heard a sound,—but all was silent. Imagining that he probably would not sleep he placed a book near his bedside—but nature was kind to his age and temperament, and after about an hour of wakefulness and sad perplexity, all ruffling care was gradually smoothed away from his mind, and he fell into a deep and dreamless slumber.