Suddenly tears started into her eyes.
“Another believer in the angel!” she thought.
“May I come in?”
It was Mr. Bry’s cold voice. His discontented, sleek face was peeping round the door.
Sir Donald got up to go.
As Lady Holme drove away from Covent Garden that night she was haunted by a feverish, embittering thought:
“Will everyone notice it but Fritz?”
Lord Holme indeed seemed scarcely the same man who had forbidden Carey to come any more to his house, who had been jealous of Robin Pierce, who had even once said that he almost wished his wife were an ugly woman. The Grand Turk nature within him, if not actually dead, was certainly in abeyance. He was so intent on his own affairs that he paid no heed at all to his wife’s, even when they might be said to be also his. Leo Ulford was becoming difficult to manage, and Lord Holme still gaily went his way. As Lady Holme thought over Sir Donald’s words she felt a crushing weight of depression sink down upon her. The brougham rolled smoothly on through the lighted streets. She did not glance out of the windows, or notice the passing crowds. In the silence and darkness of her own soul she was trying not to feel, trying to think.
A longing to be incautious, to do something startling, desperate, came to her.
It was evident that Mrs. Ulford had been complaining to Sir Donald about his son’s conduct. With whom? Lady Holme could not doubt that it was with herself. She had read, with one glance at the fluttering pink eyelids, the story of the Leo Ulford’s menage. Now, she was not preoccupied with any regret for her own cruelty or for another woman’s misery. The egoism spoken of by Carey was not dead in her yet, but very much alive. As she sat in the corner of the brougham, pressing herself against the padded wall, she was angry for herself, pitiful for herself. And she was jealous—horribly jealous. That woke up her imagination, all the intensity of her. Where was Fritz to-night? She did not know. Suddenly the dense ignorance in which every human being lives, and must live to the end of time, towered above her like a figure in a nightmare. What do we know, what can we ever know of each other? In each human being dwells the most terrible, the most ruthless power that exists—the power of silence.