He took her to Switzerland, to Germany, to Southern France, keeping well out of the way of other tourists, and ten months followed—ten months of such exquisite, unalloyed bliss, as rarely falls to mortal man. Unalloyed, did I say? Well, not quite, since earth and heaven are two different places. In the dead of pale Southern nights, with the shine of the moon on his wife's lovely sleeping face; in the hot, brilliant noontide; in the sweet, green gloaming—Inez Catheron's black eyes came menacingly before him—the one bitter drop in his cup. All his life he had been a little afraid of her. He was something more than a little afraid of her now.
They returned. The commodious lodgings in Russell Square awaited him, and Sir Victor "went in" for domestic felicity in the parish of Bloomsbury, "on the quiet." Very much "on the quiet" no theatre going, no opera, no visitors, and big Captain Jack Erroll, of the Second Grenadiers, his only guest. Four months of this sort of thing, and then—and then there was a son.
Lying in her lace-draped, satin-covered bed, looking at baby's fat little, funny little face, Ethel, Lady Catheron, began to think. She had time to think in her quiet and solitude. Monthly nurses and husbands being in the very nature of things antagonistic, and nurse being reigning potentate at present, the husband was banished. And Lady Catheron grew hot and indignant that the heir of Catheron Royals should have to be born in London lodgings, and the mistress of Catheron Royals live shut up like a nun, or a fair Rosamond in a bower.
"You have no relations living but your cousin, Victor," she said to him, more coldly than she had ever spoken in her life. "Are you master in your own house, or is she? Are you afraid of this Miss Catheron, who writes you such long letters (which I never see), that you dare not take your wife home?"
He had told her something of that other story necessarily—his former engagement to his cousin, Inez. Only something—not the bare ugly truth of his own treachery. The soap-boiler's daughter was more noble of soul than the baronet. Gentle as she was, she would have despised him thoroughly had she known the truth.
"This secrecy has lasted long enough," Lady Catheron said, a resolute-looking expression crossing her pretty, soft-cut mouth. "The time has come when you must speak. Don't make me think you are ashamed of me, or afraid of her. Take me home—it is my right; acknowledge your son—it is his. When there was only I, it did not so much matter—it is different now."
She lifted one of baby's dots of hands, and kissed it. And Sir Victor, his face hidden in the shadow of the curtains, his voice husky, made answer:
"You are right, Ethel—you always are. As soon as you both can travel, my wife and child shall come home with me to Catheron Royals."
Just three weeks later, as the August days were ending, came that last letter from Inez, commanding his return. His hour had come. He took the next morning train, and went forth to meet the woman he feared and had wronged.
* * * * *