“Why can’t people get over all their crying beforehand and in private, I wonder,” said Mr Thurston, rather gruffly, as he stood among the other guests to watch the departure of the hero and heroine of the day. He spoke half to himself, but the young lady standing beside him made answer to his remark.
“It is no real test of feeling to cry when one is excited. I fancy it is a mere physical result of the sort of fuss a girl is kept in for some time before. Where a bride is really unhappy she would probably exert herself to hide her feelings.”
“Then you think Eugenia Laurence—I beg her pardon, Mrs Chancellor—is really happy? At least that is the inference from what you say,” inquired Gerald.
“I did not mean to imply anything,” answered Roma, lightly. “I only said her crying or not crying had nothing to say to her real feelings. But if you want to know my real opinion—I am almost a stranger to her, remember—I do think she is very, perfectly happy.”
She raised her keen but kindly dark eyes to Mr Thurston as she spoke, and looked him full in the face. “Far better for him to have done at once and for ever with all sentimentalism about her,” was the thought in her mind. “She is thoroughly and pathetically in love with Beauchamp and has never cared a straw for Mr Thurston, and the more completely he realises this the better for every one concerned.” Nevertheless she rather expected to detect some sign of remaining soreness—he had been so very deeply in earnest about the girl, the Eugenia of his dreams, when she had last seen him that night at Brighton at the Montmorrises’—to find him shrink from her unpalatable expression of belief in the perfect happiness of Beauchamp’s wife. She was disappointed. Mr Thurston only looked grave, and his voice was completely free from effort or constraint when he spoke again.
“I am very glad, very thankful that you think so,” he said. “I am very much in earnest in my hopes that she will be happy, that she has chosen well for herself. And of course, though you know her slightly, you must know him—Captain Chancellor—well, therefore your opinion has great weight with me.”
His eyes, the deep-set, penetrating grey eyes, whose expression, now she saw them again, seemed curiously familiar to her—were fixed on her this time. Roma felt uncomfortable; it was not easy to allow one’s words to be taken for more than their value under the scrutiny of Gerald Thurston’s gaze. A slight look of embarrassment crept over her face. “Yes,” she began, “Beauchamp and I are very old friends; very good friends too. I have a great regard for him. I think he has a great many good qualities but—I did not exactly mean—I don’t quite—” she floundered more and more desperately as she became conscious of the increasing gravity of her hearer’s expression, then suddenly she came to a dead stop.
Mr Thurston did not appear to pity her confusion. He remained silent for a minute, as if half expecting her to speak again, then he said, quietly—
“I wish you would not be afraid of telling me what you really do mean. We seem fated to be confidential with each other at rather short notice, don’t we? And I don’t think you will consider my interest in what we were speaking of unnatural.”
“No, indeed I do not,” returned Roma, cordially. “And I should be very sorry for you to misunderstand me or attach more weight to what I may say or not say than it is worth. Only when I said I thought Eugenia perfectly happy, I suppose I meant that she thinks herself so.”