Stephen Glynn started, and his face hardened. The subject was evidently unwelcome to the point of pain.
“She writes to you?”
“I write to her! Of course she answers. I was always fond of Honor.”
“Possibly. Before her marriage. As Stanor’s wife, however—”
Pixie bent forward, looking him full in the face.
“I have no quarrel with Stanor’s wife. I was angry with him. There was something in me which he hurt very much.—I think,” she slightly shrugged her shoulder, and a flicker of a smile passed over her face, and was gone, “’twas my pride! It hurt to think he had been forced to come back. If he’d trusted me and told the truth it would have saved suffering for us—all! At the time I felt I could never forgive him, but that passed. I don’t say I can ever think of him as I did before, as quite honest and true, but—” The smile flashed back. “Can you go on being angry, yourself?”
“I—don’t think,” said Stephen slowly, “that ‘angry’ is the right word. I’m disappointed—disappointed with a bitterness which has its root in ten long years of hope and effort. Practically I have lived my life through that boy. My great object and desire was to secure for him all that I had missed. I had made no definite promises, it seemed wiser not, but in effect he was my heir, and all I have would have gone to him. Now that’s over! The future has been taken from me, as well as the past. America has absorbed him. He has already, through his wife, more money than he can use, and the rôle of an English country gentleman has lost its attractions for him. There was a time in my first outburst of indignation when I should have felt it a relief to have had some power of retaliation, but, as you say, that passed. ... He was the only person whom I could in any sense claim as my own, and—I’ve lost him! He is independent of me now. I can do no more for him.” The dark eyes were full of pain. “That is, after all, the thing that hurts the most. The lad has faults, but I loved him. I lived through him; now I can do no more, and our lives fall apart. There’s a big blank!”
Pixie did not answer. Her face was very pale; in her ears was a loud thudding noise, which seemed mysteriously to be inside her own breast.
“As for his wife, she may be a good girl—she appears to have behaved in an honourable fashion—but to me it’s a new type, and I can’t pretend that I’m not prejudiced. There is only one thing that is satisfactory. The boy is honestly in love, even to the extent of abandoning his career to assist in the management of a pickle factory.”
There was an inflection in the tone in which these last words were pronounced which brought Pixie’s eyes upon him in reproach.