"C'est le premier pas qui coute," and Malcolm proved the truth of the old French proverb, as he dismissed his fly and walked up the dark drive towards the Wood House.
He no longer felt the hot and cold fits that had shaken him as though with inward ague on his previous visit. He had seen Elizabeth again, had at least retained his outward calmness, and now he felt more sure of himself.
"The pains and penalties of life," Leah had said to him once, and he had thought the expression a strange one on the lips of so beautiful a woman; but he knew better now, and how such pains and penalties fall to the share of many men. "It is all in the day's work," he muttered as he rang the bell, for it was Malcolm's nature to philosophise even in trouble.
It was only six o'clock, and the two sisters were sitting together in the fire-lit twilight. Dinah was lying back in her easy-chair with her eyes closed, but Elizabeth had drawn her chair opposite the fire, and sat with her chin supported by her hands, gazing fixedly at the blazing logs with an absorbed gravity that again surprised Malcolm.
When they heard the visitor announced they both started to their feet and came towards him, but it was Elizabeth who spoke first. "Mr. Herrick, this is too good of you. I hope—I trust," in an anxious tone, "that your news is also good."
"You may rest assured of that," he returned, with an unconscious pressure of her hand. Dinah heaved a deep sigh of relief, and pointed silently to the chair that stood between them. She did not speak, perhaps because she could not: her face looked as though she had passed through an illness. Elizabeth, with her wonted quickness, answered Malcolm's unspoken question.
"Dinah has had one of her bad sick headaches, and has only just come downstairs. All this sad business has upset her greatly, but you will be her best physician," with the old beaming smile which Malcolm dared not meet. "Now," with a housewifely air, "shall I give you some tea? You will dine with us, of course?" But Malcolm declined the offered refreshment.
"I will dine with you if you wish it," he said rather formally, "and if you and Miss Templeton will excuse the absence of war-paint; but I am going back to town to-night."
"Oh no, not to-night!" she exclaimed in quite a shocked voice; "you will be so tired." But Malcolm assured her with absolute truth that he had never been less tired in his life. The storm and stress and excitement of the day had acted on him like a tonic as well as an anodyne; in thinking and planning for others he had found relief from the intolerable ache of ever-present pain that had made his life so purgatorial of late, and the unhealed wound throbbed less cruelly.
"I have so much to tell you that I think I had better begin at once," he observed in a business-like tone, and then both the sisters composed themselves to listen. But this time they heard him less calmly. The shock of learning Saul Jacobi's disgraceful plot, and Cedric's infatuation and weakness, was too much for Dinah, and she sobbed audibly.