"DEAR MISS MAURICE"—(it ran)—"At last I am allowed to write and say—Come. Not this afternoon, because he had quite a long outing this morning in that blessed spell of sunshine; and he is sound asleep after it, has been for an hour and more; or of course he would send a line with this himself. Come to dinner. Half-past seven. Then you can have a long evening together without keeping him up too late. For Theo is still high-handed with him about sleep and rest. But really he has made astonishing progress since we got him over here. Dr O'Malley is quite comically elated over his recuperative power. Says he has seldom seen such a rapid and vigorous convalescence after concussion; and takes more than half the credit to himself; but I am convinced that it is you who are mainly responsible for it. He says little enough, even to Theo. Yet one can see how impatient he is to be well again, because of you; and that's half the battle. Though perhaps my prosaic zeal for concentrated food of all kinds deserves to be taken into account! Theo, who is reading every word of this over my shoulder—in spite of my insistence on the privacy of all correspondence!—wishes to point out that his own genius for nursing is really at the bottom of it. (N.B.—This is simply because he wants you to be extra charming to him to-night!) But apart from all my nonsense, the point remains that among us all we have done great things in less than three weeks. Come and see for yourself, and we can squabble over our laurels at leisure!
"Theo sends sympathy and salaams, and I think you know that I am very really 'yours,'
"HONOR M. DESMOND."
Quita smiled as she folded up the note, though her lashes were wet with more than mist. Tears came too readily to her eyes just now, a fact that engendered occasional bickerings between herself and Michael.
"And to think that I was blind enough to hate that dear woman," she thought. "I, who pride myself on my intuition!"
Then she scribbled a hasty note of acceptance, despatched the jhampanni, and remained standing absently by the verandah rail, looking out into nothingness; trying to grasp the fact that the longest, hardest three weeks of her life were over; that in less than four hours' time she would once more set eyes on the man who was, to all intents and purposes, her newly accepted lover; would verify in the flesh the remembrance of that wonderful night and morning.
The thought so unsteadied her, that she clenched her hands, and jerked herself together. Having more of Diana than of Venus in her composition, the intensity of her love—since avowal had levelled all barriers—was a constant surprise to her; and now she was even a little ashamed of her natural longing for the touch of hands and lips, that she had at times been disposed to scorn. None the less, she hoped, unblushingly, that she would be allowed to have him to herself for an hour, or so; hoped also—nay, confidently expected—that she would end in overruling this stern purpose of his, that irritated her, even while it compelled her admiration.
To her, as to all eager natures, the appeal of the present was all-powerful, the more so when that present offered her with both hands the best that life has to give. To sacrifice it on the altar of a problematical future seemed sheer folly; magnificent folly, perhaps, but, in the circumstances her quickened heart leaned towards a less magnificent wisdom. She detected in this unmanageable husband of hers a strain of unpretentious heroism, which delighted her in the abstract. But when the heroic puts on flesh and blood, and shoulders itself into our narrow lives, it is apt to appear a little too big for the stage; and Quita had an artist's eye for proportion, whether in pictures or in the human comedy.
Moreover, a mingling of French and Irish blood rarely results in an irksome development of the conscience, or of that moral bugbear, a sense of responsibility; and deep down, Quita knew herself to be more like her brother in both respects than she quite cared to acknowledge. For all her husband's conscientious suggestion that marriage was a "complicated affair," she persisted in regarding it simply as the crown and completion of their great love, a happiness to which they were entitled by every law human and divine. The generations still to be had not yet laid their arresting hand upon her. In her esteem, such shadowy probabilities had neither right nor power to stem the new imperious forces at work within her.
It remains to add that Eldred's avowal had not shocked or repelled her as much as he had feared. For, among Michael's promiscuous intimates in Paris, Vienna, Rome, she had seen and heard more than Lenox was likely to guess of that enslavement to drugs and absinthe to which the artist's temperament seems peculiarly prone; though she was far from realising in detail the full horror and degradation involved. She merely felt certain that—heredity or no—Eldred was, by the nature of him, incapable of travelling far down that awful road; that with her at his side to hearten and help him, he could not fail to free himself from "the accursed chain."