The rejoinder tarried, but when it came there was a tinge of compunction in it.
“You are quite right. I do not think that the Aylmers will let her forget her parentage in a hurry.”
Both fell silent.
Three days had passed; and during them the married pair seemed to themselves to be always falling silent. A tacit convention prevented their perpetual discussion of one subject; yet none other seemed to present itself, and the eschewed theme kept cropping up continually, like gout weed in a garden. The house seemed to both extraordinarily silent. Their late guest had never been noisy, and it would have seemed impossible that the removal of so small and soundless a presence could have made any difference in a great house’s contribution to the noise of the world. Yet the absence of so—as one would have thought—imperceptible a footfall on the deep-carpeted stairs; the extinction of such tiny trills of song and wafts of laughter made the rooms seem void, as if uninhabited, and hushed as if one lay dead in them. It was strange that this deliverance from a little adventuress, of whose existence they had six months earlier been ignorant, should have made the woman feel the bitter curse of her barrenness, and the man the contemptible vacuity of his self-murdered life more acutely than ever before.
It was under a variety of aspects that the subject reared its shunned head. Camilla was always the one to introduce and then curtly dismiss it.
“I imagine,” she said one evening, after having been observing for some moments the idle flutter and dip of the leaves of the book her husband was ostensibly reading, “that you are feeling as if all the little colour that was in them had been withdrawn from our somewhat grey lives; is it not so?”
There was no anger nor even surprise, only a sort of compassion in her tone, as of one gauging anew the drabness of an existence in which such an illumination could be felt as a loss.
Edward regained a firmer grip of his paper-knife.
“Are you judging me by yourself?” he asked, with a smile not more melancholy than, and as calmly kind as usual. “Are you sure that it is not you who are missing our patch of scarlet?”
“I should miss a blister when it was taken off,” she answered, and the subject dropped.