He leaned heavily on the young man's arm. "It's shaken me. I shall never be the fellow I was. I can't understand it. Nobody could have done more for any girl than I've done for Frida; and she deserts me, Durant, deserts me in my old age with my strength failing."
Durant vainly tried to make himself worthy of Frida Tancred's trust, but he could add nothing to her reasoning, and she had kept her best argument to the last,—"It will make less difference to you than my marriage would have made."
"After all, sir, will it make so very much difference if—if your daughter does go away for a year or two?"
"I can't say. I can't tell you that till I've tried it, my boy. It's all too new to me, and I tell you I can't understand it."
He trailed off with a slow and stricken movement, like a lesser Lear, and reëntered the house by the window of Frida's room. The sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his sense of her desertion.
"Look at that. She was my right hand, Maurice, and I can't realize that she's gone. It's the queerest sensation; I feel as if she was here and yet wasn't here."
Durant said he had heard that people felt like that after the amputation of their right hands. As for the wound, he hoped that time would heal it.
"Any soldier can tell you that old wounds will still bleed, Durant. I think that was the luncheon bell."
Lunch, over which the Colonel lingered lovingly and long, somewhat obscured the freshness of the tragedy, and made it a thing of the remoter past. An hour later he was playing with his little rain-gauge on the lawn. At afternoon teatime he appeared immaculately attired in the height of the fashion; brown boots, the palest of pale gray summer suitings, a white piqué waistcoat, the least little luminous hint of green in his silk necktie, and he seemed the spirit of youth incarnate.
At this figure Durant smiled with a pity that was only two-thirds contempt. He longed to ask him whether the old wound was bleeding badly. He was bound to believe that the Colonel had a heart under his immaculate waistcoat, with pulses and arteries the same as other people's, his own unconquerable conviction being that if you pricked the gentlemannikin he would bleed sawdust.