He returned to his arm-chair and his books, but soon drew Kitty's couvre-pied over him and went to sleep.
When he awoke, daylight was in the room. "What has happened to them?" he asked himself, in a sudden anxiety.
And amid the silence of the dawn he paced up and down, a prey for the first time to black depression. He was besieged by memories of the last two months, their anxieties and quarrels—the waste of time and opportunity—the stabs to feeling and self-respect. Once he found himself groaning aloud, "Kitty! Kitty!"
When this huge, distracting London was left behind, when he had her to himself amid the Scotch heather and birch, should he find her again—conquer her again—as in the exquisite days after their marriage? He thought of Cliffe with a kind of proud torment, disdaining to be jealous or afraid. Kitty had amused herself—had tested her freedom, his patience, to the utmost. Might she now be content, and reward him a little for a self-control, a philosophy, which had not been easy!
A French novel on Kitty's little table drew his attention. He thought not without a discomfortable humor of what a French husband would have made of a similar situation—recalling the remark of a French acquaintance on some case illustrating the freedom of English wives. "Il y a un élément turc dans le mari français, qui nous rendrait ces moeurs-là impossibles!"
À la bonne heure! Let the Frenchman keep up his seraglio standards as he pleased. An Englishman trusts both his wife and his daughter—scorns, indeed, to consider whether he trusts them or no! And who comes worst off? Not the Englishman—if, at least, we are to believe the French novel on the French ménage!
He paced thus up and down for an hour, defying his unseen critics—his mother—his own heart.
Then he went to bed and slept a little. But with the post next morning there was no letter from Kitty. There might be a hundred explanations of that. Yet he felt a sudden need of caution.
"Her ladyship comes up this morning by train," he said to Wilson, as though reading from a note. "There seems to have been a mishap."