“How sweet the hour that sets us free
To sip our scandal, and our tea,”
she observed.
Mary coloured.
“I never talk scandal,” she said in an offended voice, and Elizabeth refrained from telling her that Miss Dobell had made the same remark.
All the time that Mary was showing her over the house, Elizabeth was wondering whether it would be such a dreadfully bad thing for David to marry Katie Ellerton. Ronnie was a dear little boy, and David loved children, and Katie—Katie was one of those gentle, clinging creatures whom men adore and spoil. If she cared for him, and he grew to care for her—Elizabeth turned the possibilities over and over in her mind, wondering——
She wondered still more that evening, when David Blake came in after dinner. He had changed. Elizabeth looked at him and saw things in his face which she only half understood. He looked ill and tired, but both illness and weariness appeared to her to be incidental. Behind them there was something else, something much stronger and yet more subtle, some deflection of the man’s whole nature.
Edward and Mary did not disturb themselves at David’s coming. They were at the piano, and Edward nodded casually, whilst Mary merely waved her hand and smiled.
David said “How do you do?” to Elizabeth, and sat down by the fire. He was in evening dress, but somehow he looked out of place in Mary’s new white drawing-room. Edward had put in electric light all over the house, and here it shone through rosy shades. The room was all rose and white—roses on the chintz, a frieze of roses upon the walls, and a rose-coloured carpet on the floor. Only the two lamps over the piano were lighted. They shone on Mary. She was playing softly impassioned chords in support of Edward, who exercised a pleasant tenor voice upon the lays of Lord Henry Somerset. Mary played accompaniments with much sentiment. Occasionally, when the music was easy, she shot an adoring glance at Edward, a glance to which he duly responded, when not preoccupied with a note beyond his compass.
Elizabeth was tolerant of lovers, and Mary’s little sentimentalities, like Mary’s airs of virtuous matronhood, were often quite amusing to watch; but to-night, with David Blake as a fourth person in the room, Elizabeth found amusement merging into irritation and irritation into pain. Except for that lighted circle about the piano, the room lay all in shadow. There was a soft dusk upon it, broken every now and then by gleams of firelight. David Blake sat back in his chair, and the dimness of the room hid his face, except when the fire blazed up and showed Elizabeth how changed it was. She had been away only a month, and he looked like a stranger. His attitude was that of a very weary man. His head rested on his hand, and he looked all the time at Mary in the rosy glow which bathed her. When she looked up at Edward, he saw the look, saw the light shine down into her dark eyes and sparkle there. Not a look, not a smile was lost, and whilst he watched Mary, Elizabeth watched him. Elizabeth was very glad of the dimness that shielded her. It was a relief to drop the mask of a friendly indifference, to be able to watch David with no thought except for him. Her heart yearned to him as never before. She divined in him a great hunger—a great pain. And this hunger, this pain, was hers. The longing to give, to assuage, to comfort, welled up in her with a suddenness and strength that were almost startling. Elizabeth took her thought in a strong hand, forcing it along accustomed channels from the plane where love may be thwarted, to that other plane, where love walks unashamed and undeterred, and gives her gifts, no man forbidding her. Elizabeth sat still, with folded hands. Her love went out to David, like one ripple in a boundless, golden sea, from which they drew their being, and in which they lived and moved. A sense of light and peace came down upon her.