'He worships her just as Tony does,' he thought. 'He's not veneered, it's high-mindedness. By Jove, what a look he had, deathly white. He's wrapped up in her. Well, well, it's another case of the old old story at its best.'
And he had feared that Cynthia was making a mistake! Faith had failed him with both.
[CHAPTER XII]
COUNTER-OPINIONS AT OLD LAFER
On the day Danby's letter to the Admiral arrived, Cynthia too had one. It was the more important-looking of the two; had the Admiral seen it he would have fired into anger, suspecting its contents. But she received it in her own room before breakfast. She knew what it held the moment her eye lit on the envelope. Nothing less than a photograph could be there. She had asked for one.
When, a little later, she emerged in the gallery, Mrs. Hennifer was just disappearing down the stairs. She ran after her and brought her back, putting the photograph into her hands, and looking at it over her shoulder.
It was a remarkable face, and Mrs. Hennifer knew instantly that she had seen it before, and that Cynthia was going to marry the man to whom Mrs. Severn had once been engaged. It was not, however, then sealed by the sardonic keenness that marked it now. Danby's life had been passed in India, but the skin was still, as it had been in youth, extraordinarily white, except on the jaw and upper lip, where close shaving tinged it with indigo. The features were of the moulded rather than the chiselled type. The eyes had a straight gaze of penetrating hardness that, remaining fixed, yet seemed to go beyond the object looked at, and thus could not be deemed offensive. They concentrated the interest of the face. The pupils had the opaqueness of marble, but Mrs. Hennifer knew that the radiating violet of the iris possessed the faculty of a sea-anemone in contracting and expanding. Had she not known Danby she would have detested those eyes as holding what a bad man might reciprocate and a good woman resent; discovering to the one too much knowledge, to the other the nearness of evil. But she knew him as a young man, and she remembered the mortal agony of wasted tenderness they had once shown her. Why was her darling Cynthia to be the atonement for that agony? Surely it was unnatural that her young and ardent life should have chosen the subdued emotions of a man whose drama of emotion she had herself witnessed years ago, when she and her husband and he were at the same Indian station. Ought she, must she tell Cynthia all this? Or had Danby himself? Did he know that Clothilde was at Old Lafer?