Her dignity and self-control added greatly to Michael Ireton's admiration for her. He, too, had been struck by her resemblance to Hadassah, so her beauty appealed to him very strongly.
Hadassah and her husband allowed her to go home to England without protest. Cairo was becoming very hot for an English girl, and they both agreed that it might do Michael Amory good to learn, when he did turn up, that his conduct had hurt Margaret's pride, that she was seriously wounded. As Millicent had spoken to Margaret of Michael as being in robust health, they had banished the idea that his silence was due to illness.
Outwardly Margaret behaved as though the whole episode of her love-affair with Michael Amory was at an end. A woman's life is dog-eared by her love-affairs; this was the first in Margaret's book of life. To the Iretons she was always very insistent that there had been no formal engagement between them, that Michael had not allowed her to think of herself as bound to him in any way—for only one reason he had not considered himself justified in asking her to become his wife or to wait for him. This to the Iretons meant nothing. He had made Margaret love him—that was the essential point—and his sensibilities must have told him that with such a girl love was no light thing. He must have realized that Margaret had given him the one perfect gift in her possession, an unselfish love.
Margaret was very loyal to her lover. It was easy to be that, for in her super-senses she was convinced of his great love for her, as a thing apart from anything else. She found it wise to discuss the mystery of his silence less and less; for she knew that no one but God knows what is in our hearts, or what He has put there for our consolation, and that to all outward appearances things looked very black for Michael.
And so it came to pass that she sailed for England in the same boat as Freddy. He had hurried through his business and had managed to secure a passage, so as to look after her and be a companion to her on her disconsolate voyage.
On the journey to Marseilles, Margaret discovered qualities in Freddy's character which, even with all her love for him, she had never imagined. For her sake he contrived to hide his anger at Michael for his treatment of her, and thus express a sympathetic understanding of the temptations which had beset him. If Margaret had not suffered, he would have ignored the affair altogether, as a matter which did not concern him. Freddy was very far-seeing. Margaret had kept her promise; she had shown that in spite of her romantic love for Michael her womanly pride had not been wanting. Any opposition or harsh denouncement of her lover would have brought out the obstinacy in her Lampton character. Persecution inflames the ardour of both love and religion. Margaret had confided to Freddy the true state of her feelings—her love was perhaps even greater than ever for the tardy Michael; jealousy had invigorated and reinforced it: but her pride and her love were wounded, and until Michael wrote to her or came to her, with a full and absolute apology and a good reason for his silence, she was determined not to play the part of a woman whose love would submit to any sort of casual treatment.
Freddy was well content. Time would settle things; Margaret was very young; she was scarcely aware yet of the possibilities that were in her own nature, of the things which can make life worth living, as apart from love and its passions. Love had buried her under an avalanche of its mystery and revelations.
Their journey home was as uneventful as it was surprising, for summer on the Mediterranean, where there is no spring, opened Margaret's eyes to a new phase of Nature's beauty. There was so much to see, and Freddy was such an excellent companion, that the time passed far more quickly and happily than Margaret could have believed possible. Did she know that it was the guarded light, which dispersed her brooding thoughts, thoughts which tried to spoil the beauty of the fairest scenes she had ever seen?
It was a voyage of solace and healing. As they sat together, the brother and sister, idly watching the spell of light resting on an archipelago of dreaming islands, or sailed out of the Bay of Naples on a morning of tender unreality, they little dreamed that in her womb the world was breeding a hellish massacre of God's highest creatures, a wholesale slaughter of His children; that that same summer's sun was to fall on fields of crimson, dyed with the blood of civilized nations, precious blood drawn from the veins of patriots and heroes by the lies and lust of a war-mad king.
Ischia, lost in its ancient sleep, cradled in the beauty of the world's fairest waters, was to be waked with the bugles of war. From her mountain heights and her seagirt fields she was to send forth her sons, to fight until they became drunk with the smell of blood.