She stopped.
“Promise me one thing,” she said at last in a different voice. “Promise me that you will not marry Mr. Arabian. I won’t ask anything else of you; only that.”
“But I won’t promise. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because—because I don’t know what I am going to do, what I might do.” She looked down, then added in a low voice; “He fascinates me.”
For the first time since she had come into the room there was a helpless sound in Miss Van Tuyn’s voice, a sound that was wholly girlish, absolutely, transparently sincere. Lady Sellingworth did not miss it.
“I haven’t made up my mind,” she said. “But he fascinates me.”
And at that moment Lady Sellingworth knew she was speaking the truth. She remembered her own madnesses, sunk away in the past, but still present to her, gripped between the tentacles of memory. Beryl, too, was then capable of the great follies which often exist side by side with great vanity. The wild heart confronted Lady Sellingworth in another. And she felt suddenly a deep sense of pity, a sense that seemed flooded with tears, the pity that age sometimes feels for youth coming on into life, on into the devious ways, with their ambushes, their traps, their pitfalls full of darkness and fear. She was even conscious of a tenderness of age which till now had been a rare visitor in her difficult nature. Seymour Portman seemed near her, almost with her in the room. She could almost hear his voice speaking of spring with all its daffodils.
Noblesse oblige. In her torn heart could she find a nobleness sufficient for this occasion? Seymour’s eyes, the terrible eyes of affection, which require so much and which sometimes, because of that, seem to be endowed with creative power, forcing into life that which they long to see, were surely upon her, watching for her nobility, asking for it, demanding it of her.
She took Beryl Van Tuyn by the wrist and led her away from the shut door back to the fire.