"Very odd; people are singularly fond of pairing their neighbours, but they don't often hit upon the right pairs."
"Perhaps not," answers Constance, closing her eyes, and looking bored, whereupon Esther lapses into silence.
Every Jack has his Jill; but my Jill is probably in Siberia or Hong Kong, and yours is close at hand; so I marry yours, and you, being in Siberia or Hong Kong, marry mine, and we both rue it to our dying day.
[CHAPTER XXXIII.]
Next morning St. John wakes, recovered from his ill temper, his headache, and all the effects of his Irish saturnalia. Perhaps, had he known who it was that lay wakeful in a great ginger four-poster, two doors off, his slumbers would not have been so profound. The hounds meet twelve miles away, at Shepherds Hatch. By nine o'clock he is in the saddle, and riding quietly along the deep Essex lanes and wet fields, with a soft, south wind blowing in his face, and the grass, crisped by the slightest possible frost, beneath the horse's hoofs.
He is lucky enough to come in for the run of the season; has the satisfaction of seeing many better men than himself floundering, hatless and well-watered, in a brook, or getting croppers over stiff hawthorn hedges; over all which obstacles his grey, a new investment, of whose fencing powers he and his groom had been unjustly doubtful, carries him like a bird. As to whether his ladylove may relish this early preference of "bold Reynolds" to herself, any more than she relished his fatigue and headache last night, he troubles himself but little. He has no intention whatever of being a hen-pecked husband. When he proposed to her, he told her what he could give her, and what he could not—what she might expect, and what she might not: nor has this day's desertion been any departure from his half of the bargain. Somewhere about five o'clock he is back again at Blessington, splashed from head to heel; his tops, in which this morning you might have seen your face, all stained and discoloured; with a dab of mud on each cheek, and a third on the bridge of his nose. He runs upstairs lightly, whistling a tune, and has just reached the first landing, when, "Click-clack," he hears a woman's high-heeled shoes descending. It is Esther, who is walking listlessly down, with her eyes fixed on a great picture let into the wall—a large, white woman, with her clothes tumbling off, hurling her substantial person upon a spear; a young man, with arms like a blacksmith's, lying on the ground, making a profuse display of his charms, and, though with no very perceptible wound, evidently in articulo mortis; a fat Cupid blubbering hard by—the whole entitled "Pyramus and Thisbe."
St. John looks upward, to see who the author of the "click-clacking" may be. "Who the devil is this pretty girl?" is his first thought. His second—a thought that makes him stagger back with the colour hurrying from his healthy cheek—a thought full of anger, astonishment, desire, and pain—a thought that involuntarily he speaks aloud, is "Esther."
At almost the same moment she has caught sight of him. In her case, there is no surprise; but the pain is as great, if not greater.