Her passion for Harry Lassett, if it existed, was a more difficult matter. The man of forty, who has never married, is prone to some sentimentality where calf love is concerned. Well as he may disguise it from the world, there is a bias towards a lover's Arcady; a tenderness for the secret groves which he will never confess. The mere man goes out to the witching hour of the young life. He has mad moments when he rages against his lost youth, and would regain it, even at the cost of his fortune. One such moment Faber himself had known when he went out with Maryska to the hills. It would never recur; he had mastered it wholly even before they returned to Ragusa; but he could credit Gabrielle with a similar weakness, and wonder how far it would wreck her story. Let her marry Harry Lassett, and the first chapters of a pitiful tragedy surely were written. He was quite certain of that.
With this was some new estimate of his own position. He could be no hero in the eyes of such a woman. From that standpoint his appeal to her must be quite hopeless. There had been nothing of the dashing cavalier in his record, nothing but the mere amassing of money; no glamour, no public applause. Women like all that and forget much else when it is there. He had not done the "great good thing" which Maryska, the untutored child, had promised him he might do. Was it too late even yet? This temple he would build at Gabrielle's bidding, must it stand as the perpetual witness to the futility of his own attainments?
And so, finally, and merging into the one great thought was his own awakening love for a beautiful woman. He no longer doubted this. Admiration was becoming a passion of desire, which might lead him to strange ends. He saw her as she sat by the fireside, the warm light upon her eloquent face—he heard her sympathetic voice, watched the play of gesture, the changing but ever-winning expression. He would have given her every penny he had in the world that night to have called her his wife. It came to him as an obsession that he could not live without her.
For thus do men of forty love, and in such a passion do the years often mock them!
CHAPTER III
AFTER TEN DAYS
I
Bertie Morris was a man who rarely knocked upon any doors, and certainly, had he stooped to such a weakness, it would not have been upon the door of his very democratic patron, John Faber, who was never surprised to see him whatever the hour or the place.