For within Maggie's tender heart a love for Geoffrey Ripon had gained the mastery since the interview in the secret chamber. Long had that love haunted her gentle heart, a shade at first, which flitted away for a while, only to return again and trouble her. But just as she had installed her love in the innermost sanctuary, fair and godlike, she had discovered, as she thought, that her idol had feet of clay; that the man whose lips and tongue told her that he loved her on the one day was on the next saying the same thing with the same lying lips to another woman.
Mrs. Carey had been Geoffrey's first love. Sir John had told her that, she remembered. "He loves her still and he pretends to care for me because I am rich," she said to herself as she lay tossing sleepless during the night, a dull pang racking her heart with a real physical pain. In the early morning she arose and looked out of the window over toward Geoffrey's house, down over the lawn and the cliff path and the leafy chestnut trees.
"He is false," she said to herself, thinking of our hero who was sleeping so soundly under the little roof in the valley. "He tried to talk with me on the drive home as if nothing had happened. He is an actor who plays at love, and his eyes and his tongue are under his control as if he were the walking gentleman in the comedy, who kisses the maid while he is waiting in the parlor for the mistress. He does not love Margaret Windsor; he loves her father's stocks and bonds, and he longs for riches, even with the encumbrance of a wife."
She smiled bitterly as she thought of the breaking up of her dream of love, and she almost cursed the riches which had weighed her down and had filled her with suspicion of all the men who had ever asked her hand in marriage. She had thought that Geoffrey had been prevented from asking for it two years before because he had felt that she was rich and he was poor. When he had bade her farewell in Paris he had hesitated and tried to say something to her, she remembered, but had compressed his lips into a forced smile and taken his leave of her.
As she looked out the window she heard a rumble of wheels and saw the phaeton rolling Mrs. Carey down to the station.
"What is that woman doing at this hour in the morning?" Maggie asked herself, looking with hot, jealous eyes at the beauty as she sat back in the phaeton. "It is dreadful to have such a person under one's roof. I hope that she is gone and that she will not return. I suppose, though, that she is to meet Lord Brompton somewhere."
And so it happened that at the moment that Geoffrey felt the first pulsing strength of his love for her, and vowed that he would, despite her riches and his entanglements, strive to gain her, Maggie was strangling her old love for him, and her heart was filled with jealous fears; and the woman whose wild passion had ruffled the current of their true love was speeding to London to work their ruin.
Breakfast at Ripon House was a straggling, informal meal, and the men came down in pink coats. They were going hunting on an anise-seed trail, and ordered what they wished, standing by the side-board and eating. Maggie, after the men had followed the hounds, left the other ladies gossiping together in the library before the fire.
She walked down the cliff path which led to the shingle beach, upon which the small craft of the fishermen in the little village were hauled up.
Against one of the boats a fisherman, dressed in oil-skins, was leaning. He had a paint-brush in his hand, and he was gazing out ruefully over the bay, which was lashed into white caps by the strong breeze. When he saw Maggie, he pulled at his forelock and set to work vigorously with his paint-brush on the stern of his boat, daubing with the black paint over the name of the craft. As the fisherman obliterated the name, Maggie noticed that his hand trembled and that he turned his head away from her that she might not see his face.