The Warden had not mentioned a walk. Perhaps he hadn't found an opportunity with those men present! Should she go for a walk alone? She found herself dressing, putting on her things with a feverish haste. Then she took off her coat and sat down, and took her hat off and held it on her knees.
She thought she heard the sound of a voice in the corridor outside, and she put on her hat with trembling fingers and caught up the coat and scarf and her gloves.
She went out into the corridor and found it empty and still. She went to the head of the stairs. There was no sound coming from the library. But even if the Warden were still there with the other men, she might not hear any sounds of their talk. They might be there or they might not. It was impossible to tell.
Perhaps he had gone to look for her in the drawing-room and, finding no one there, had gone out.
The drawing-room door was open. She glanced in. The room was empty, of course, and the afternoon sunshine was coming in through the windows, falling across the floor towards the fireplace. It would soon creep up to the portrait over the fireplace.
May waited several minutes, walking about the room and listening, and then she went out and closed the door behind her. She went down the staircase into the hall, opened the front door very slowly and went out.
An indescribable loneliness seized her as she walked over the gravelled court to the gates. The afternoon sunshine was less friendly than rain and bitter wind. She took the road to the parks, meeting the signs of the war that had obliterated the old Sunday afternoons of Oxford in the days of peace. Here was suffering, a deliberate preparation for more suffering. Did all this world-suffering make her small personal grief any less? Yes, it did; it would help her to get over the dreary space of time, the days, months, years till she was a grey-haired woman and was resigned, having learned patience and even become thankful!
Once she thought she saw the figure of the Warden in the distance, and then her heart beat suffocatingly, but it was not he. Once she thought she saw Bingham walking with some other man. He rounded the walk by the river and—no, it was not Mr. Bingham—the face was different. She began asking herself questions that had begun to disturb her. Was the real tragedy of the Warden's engagement to him not the discovery that Gwendolen was silly and weak, but that she was not honourable? Had he suspected something of the kind before he received that letter? Wasn't it a suspicion of the kind that had made him speak as he did in the drawing-room after they had returned from Christ Church? Might he not have been contented with Gwendolen if she had been straight and true, however weak and foolish? Was he the sort of man who demands sympathy and understanding from friends, men and women, but something very different from a wife? Was the Warden one of those men who prefer a wife to be shallow because they shrink from any permanent demand being made upon their moral nature or their intellect? Perhaps the Warden craved a wife who was thoughtless, and, choosing Gwendolen, was disappointed in her, solely because he found she was not trustworthy. That suspicion was a bitter one. Was it an unjust suspicion?
As May walked, the river beside her slipped along slowly under the melancholy willows. The surface of the water was laden with fallen leaves and the wreckage of an almost forgotten summer. It was strangely sad, this river!
May turned away and began walking back to the Lodgings. There was a deepening sunshine in the west, a glow was coming into the sky. Oh, the sadness of that glorious sunset!