Rose looked again at the picture, and her lip quivered a little in spite of herself. “Yes,” she replied simply, “I understand you; I don’t believe you will see that old look again. I feel—” she paused, choosing her words, her eyes darkening with an emotion which she was controlling with an effort—“I feel as if Margaret had died, that some one else would come back to us, some one we do not know!”
It was a striking fact that at the very moment when Margaret believed that she was about to achieve happiness, her friends regarded her as approaching its final eclipse. One moment of detachment, of the external view-point, would open an appalling vista to many a human soul, for it is true that those whom the gods desire to destroy they first make blind.
As Rose voiced this thought Allestree averted his eyes; he felt the keenest regret for his thoughtless words; Gertrude English’s unmerciful tongue had torn away the veil from Rose’s emotions. He would have been more than human had not his heart burned with a sudden fierce anger. What right had Fox, who had so much, to step in between him and the girl he loved,—to wound a heart so delicate, so sensitive, so tender as hers?
“I pity Margaret!” he said sharply, with some bitterness, “but he who sows the tares—”
“I don’t want to judge,” Rose rejoined quietly; “father is very bitter against divorce; he thinks it a menace to the national existence, and I know I think always as he does and—perhaps I’m hard, Robert;” as she spoke she looked at him appealingly, resting her slender, ungloved hand on the easel beside Margaret’s portrait; her whole attitude was one of regret, of reluctance.
“I shouldn’t like to speak of it too often,” he said in a low voice, “as it stands—in the bare aspect that we see it—Margaret’s plain justification is lost in what we know to be her wild determination to be happy at any price.”
Rose sighed. His words revealed her own thought, she knew that Margaret sought divorce to marry Fox; it was hideous to her, unpardonable, and Fox? She was silent, looking at the pictured face, seeing its mystical beauty, that weird suggestion of an unhappy fate which seemed to shadow its wild loveliness. Allestree had only dimly conveyed it, but Rose’s memory supplied the details. No wonder that men fell under her spell; there was a charm as subtle as it was absolute in her whole personality.
“Ah, well,” Rose said at last, “it is natural—she is wonderful.”
She had almost forgotten Allestree, so absorbed was she in her own thoughts; and he saw her emotion and raged again at the thought of it. With a sudden impulse he bent and kissed the hand upon the easel. Rose started violently and blushed with painful emotion.
“Robert!” she exclaimed reproachfully.