They waited—Eleanor staring into the darkness of the room—till there had been much opening and shutting of doors, and all was quiet again.
Then the two women clung to each other in a strange and pitiful embrace—offered with passion on Lucy's side, accepted with a miserable shame on Eleanor's—and Lucy slipped away.
'He was out?—in the garden?' said Eleanor to herself bewildered. And with those questions on her lips, and a mingled remorse and fever in her blood, she lay sleepless waiting for the morning.
* * * * *
Manisty indeed had also been under the night, bathing passion and doubt in its cool purity.
Again and again had he wandered up and down the terrace in the starlight, proving and examining his own heart, raised by the growth of love to a more manly and more noble temper than had been his for years.
What was in his way? His conduct towards his cousin? He divined what seemed to him the scruple in the girl's sensitive and tender mind. He could only meet it by truth and generosity—by throwing himself on Eleanor's mercy. She knew what their relations had been—she would not refuse him this boon of life and death—the explanation of them to Lucy.
Unless! There came a moment when his restless walk was tormented with the prickly rise of a whole new swarm of fears. He recalled that moment in the library after the struggle with Alice, when Lucy was just awakening from unconsciousness—when Eleanor came in upon them. Had she heard? He remembered that the possibility of it had crossed his mind. Was she in truth working against him—avenging his neglect—establishing a fatal influence over Lucy?
His soul cried out in fierce and cruel protest. Here at last was the great passion of his life. Come what would, Eleanor should not be allowed to strangle it.
Absently he wandered down a little path leading from the terrace to the podere below, and soon found himself pacing the dim grass walks among the olives. The old villa rose above him, dark and fortress-like. That was no longer her room—that western corner? No—he had good cause to remember that she had been moved, to the eastern side, beyond his library, beyond the glass passage! Those were now Eleanor's windows, he believed.