“Nonsense! He is forty-five and she is thirty-two. Very suitable. A woman ages more quickly than a man. He will look years younger with a wife to smarten him up; and they are as much in love as if they were twenty; beaming, both of them—the picture of happiness. The wedding is to be almost at once. He says they have waited long enough, and can’t afford to waste another day. I shouldn’t wonder if they rushed it through in six weeks, and took a furnished house till they had time to look round. Much the best plan.”
“Much!” agreed Vanna quietly. Jean’s impetuous speech often planted a dart of which she was the first to repent; but as she would ruefully confess to Robert, it was so difficult to think of Vanna and Piers as an engaged couple. They were so much more like a settled-down, married couple, living on quietly from day to day, taking life as it came, making no plans. It was only when she saw the shadow fall on the faces of the two listeners that she realised her mistake. She sprang to her feet and pulled loudly at the bell.
“We’ll have the children! Lorna would never forgive me if I let you go. Babs looks too sweet in her new frock...”
“Just for a moment. I must be taking Vanna home. It’s damp, and I can’t let her risk cold.”
Piers spoke hastily, and rose to his feet as if in preparation for saying adieu. Jean’s children were dainty little creatures, to whom he and Vanna were truly attached; but each shrank from seeing them in the presence of the other. The family group of the lovely mother, with her golden-haired babies, the proud, happy father, was so perfect, so complete, that less happy mortals looking on might well be excused a stab of envy. Vanna and Piers each knew the pang of the childless, which was doubled in intensity in the knowledge of the other’s suffering.
The two little girls entered the room side by side. Their sex had been a grievous disappointment to Jean, who had the overpowering desire for a son which possesses many women; but the little maids were pretty and charming enough to satisfy any parent. Lorna, dark, glowing, with her mother’s wonderful eyes; the baby Joyce, a delicious fat ball crowned with a mop of yellow curls.
They were delightfully free from shyness, and greeted the two visitors with sweet, moist kisses, and “bears’ hugs” from tiny white arms. Vanna took Joyce on her knee and tried bravely to talk baby-talk, and keep her eyes averted from Piers’s lowering face; but at the end of ten minutes she gave up the struggle, made her farewells and followed him into the street.
It was a dark, misty evening—one of those evenings when the cold penetrates to the marrow, and the great city is at its worst and dreariest. Piers turned up the collar of his coat, so that Vanna could see little of his face; but his walk, his bearing, the forward droop of his head were painfully eloquent. During the whole of the ten minutes’ walk he did not speak a word, but Vanna knew that when they were alone in her own quiet room the floodgates would open, and trembled at the thought of yet another scene. When the door was opened she went straight to her bedroom, lingering purposely over her toilette, in the hope that Piers would have time to calm down, and remember his resolution made so ardently after each fresh outburst. Of what avail to rail against fate, when the effort could only revert on one’s own head in weariness and remorse? Was it not he who had first preached the beauty of a spiritual love? This was the view on which she must lay fullest stress to-night, this the pure and lofty ideal to which she must raise his thoughts. And then Vanna—a woman through and through—stood another five minutes before the glass, carefully bestowing those little touches to her toilette which would add to her physical charm, and evoke Piers’s admiration to the uttermost.
He was pacing the room from end to end. The sound of his footsteps reached her ears before the door opened, and the moment she appeared he came towards her with outstretched arms.
“Vanna! this must end. It is unsupportable. We cannot endure it any longer. Why can every one be happy except us? Edith Morton married in six weeks! Good God, and we have waited five years; may wait for ever. To hear Jean prattling of its being so wise, so sensible, and you agreeing in a calm, even voice—it drove me wild! There are some things a man cannot stand. I have come to the end of my tether.”