“Don’t you worry about that. Geoffrey’ll marry again. They always do when the children are young.”
This was deliberate cruelty, but the strain was severe. Stanor was standing, racket in hand, gazing up at the window. The sunshine lit up his handsome face, his expectant smile. Pixie gave another flounce and turned impatiently to meet the next lament; but Esmeralda was silent, her hands were clasped on her knee, and tears—real tears—shone in her eyes. It was a rare thing for Joan to cry; the easy tears which rose to her sisters’ eyes in response to any emotion, pleasurable or the reverse, these were not for her. Looking back over the history of their lives, Pixie could count the number of times when she had seen Joan cry. The outside world vanished from her memory in response to that appeal.
“Esmeralda! Darling! You are not ill? You are not really suffering?”
Joan shook her head.
“Quite strong,” she murmured miserably; “too strong. Only it seems impossible to live on in such misery. It’s gone—the mainspring, everything! I can’t drag along! Thank God, Pixie, you are here! I never could bottle up my feelings. It’s Geoffrey—he doesn’t love me any more. I’m not imagining it—it’s true! He told me himself.”
“What did he say?” demanded Pixie practically. She displayed no dismay at the announcement, being used to her sister’s exaggerations, and feeling abundantly convinced in her own mind that this was but another example. Geoffrey was cross this morning, but five days’ residence under his roof had abundantly demonstrated that his love was not dead. “Now, what exactly did he say?” she repeated, and Joan faltered out the dread words.
There was silence in the room for a long minute. Then Pixie drew in her breath with a sharp intake. “The bloom!” she repeated softly. “The bloom!” The beautiful significance of the term seemed to occupy her mind to the exclusion of the personal application. She had a vision of love as the apotheosis of human affection, a wondrous combination of kindliness, sympathy, courtesy, patience, unselfishness—all these, and something more—that mysterious, intangible quality which Geoffrey Hilliard had so aptly described. Given “the bloom,” affection became idealised, patience a joy, and selfishness ceased to exist, since the well-being of another was preferred before one’s own; courtesy and sympathy followed automatically, as attendant spirits who could not be separated. Affection might exist, did often exist, in churlish, unlovely form, giving little happiness either to the giver or the recipient Love, the highest, was something infinitely precious, a treasure to be guarded with infinite care, lest in the stress of life its bloom should be destroyed.
Joan, looking with anxious inquiry in her sister’s face, read there an earnestness even exceeding her own.
“Oh, no!” cried Pixie strongly. “Not that, not that, Esmeralda. Not the bloom. It mustn’t go; it’s too precious. It means everything. You mustn’t let it go!”
“But I told you it had gone. It’s too late.”