The “dazzled morning moon” and the uprising sun find her still a watcher.
“I have lost a whole night’s sleep because a sick man kissed my hand out of gratitude,” she says to herself, when her eyes at length close upon the already roseing clouds. “That is sensible!”
Waking brings with it a healthier view of the episode that had cost her such a vigil—brings an effort to deride herself for attaching so much importance to what was doubtless a very commonplace form of acknowledgment. Her yesterday’s explanation returns with a certain power of soothing upon her conscience. It showed more than doubtful taste in her to volunteer it; but, at all events, he now knows that her marriage with Rupert is an unalterable certainty, and that lover-love has no part in it. Why it should be unendurable to leave an acquaintance of a fortnight’s standing under the belief that she is influenced by the ordinary motives, she omits to asks herself. But it is with a brave face of open friendliness that she presents herself at his bedside, and he asks himself by what juggle it had seemed to him that last night her spirit had kissed his in the moonlight.
In the afternoon she returns to Campion Place, bidding her patient good-bye with staid kindness, but making no mention of a possible return. She is on the doorstep, with a bright face to welcome back “her men.”
The young horse, which Sir George is driving, shies badly at barking Geist, with a foolish pretence of not recognizing him as his own family dog; and Lavinia would give anything that her eyes had not flown suspiciously to Rupert, to note whether his hand is nervously gripping the side of the dog-cart.
It is fortunate for her that both her travellers are too much occupied with their own misadventures to ask her many questions about the disposition of her time. The trip has been neither satisfactory nor final. An entry in a baptismal registry is not to be found, and a second, if not a third visit to the lawyers will probably be necessary. Two dull evenings have been passed at a hotel, as Sir George, with his usual ingenuity in making life as disagreeable to himself as he can, has morosely refused to spend them at any place of entertainment; and Rupert—as seems a matter of course to them all—has foregone his own friends and pastimes to keep him company.
The only bright spots in their history appear to be that Rupert, who to his other graces adds a connoisseurship in old silver, has picked up a George III. Loving-cup at a shop in the Strand for an old song; and that Sir George has met with some patterns of wall-paper that please him for two rooms which have not been used of late years, and in whose doing-up he takes an interest in striking contrast to his usually absolute indifference to the internal details of his household.
“They would make a nursery look nice and bright,” he says, displaying them to his niece, and speaking with that uncompromising outspeaking of his hopes, which has often before inflamed her cheeks.
It is with an inward convulsion of dismay that she realizes how enormously her repulsion for the topic, thus introduced with Saxon simplicity, has grown since it was last broached to her. Yet she must get used to it. She has never hitherto flinched from the necessary and the actual. There will be, in all human probability, a nursery; there will be children; and they will be hers—theirs.
“Yes, very bright and pretty.”