“That Sir Donald is madly in love with you?”
“Sir Donald! Sir Donald—madly anything!”
She laughed, not as if she were amused, but as if she wished to do something else and chose to laugh instead. Lady Cardington sat straight up.
“You don’t understand anything but youth,” she said.
There was a sound of keen bitterness in her low voice.
“And yet,” she added, after a pause, “you can sing till you break the heart of age—break its heart.”
Suddenly she burst into a flood of tears. Lady Holme was so surprised that she did absolutely nothing, did not attempt to console, to inquire. She sat and looked at Lady Cardington’s tall figure swayed by grief, listened to the sound of her hoarse, gasping sobs. And then, abruptly, as if someone came into the room and told her, she understood.
“You love Sir Donald,” she said.
Lady Cardington looked up. Her tear-stained, distorted face seemed very old.
“We both regret the same thing in the same way,” she said. “We were both wretched in—in the time when we ought to have been happy. I thought—I had a ridiculous idea we might console each other. You shattered my hope.”