Sibella received me with more subdued sweetness than I had ever known her display.
“You are getting on, Israel, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know; I’m just making a living, that is all.”
“Why, you know that you are quite an important person now.”
I was surprised to find that no one else came in, and more surprised when she proposed that we three should spend the evening round the schoolroom fire, as we used to do. I began to gather from Sibella’s manner that she was not looking forward to her marriage without misgivings. That she was in love with Lionel in a sort of way I had no doubt, but the price that was to be paid for a few months of ecstasy had begun to dawn upon her. Woman-like, she could not forbear to count the cost. She had never been ignorant of my feelings towards her, and from the day Lionel first entered the house there had been a constraint whenever we were left alone. Such a constraint fell upon us when Grahame, having remembered that he had a message for a friend who lived a little way off, left us for half an hour.
I believe it was at that moment that Sibella began to develop a vague feeling that from every point of view she had made a mistake. In fact, the unexpected happened, as it always does. The absolutely—from the worldly point of view—immoral and incongruous came about as if swiftly driven forward by some occult forces, and she was in my arms sobbing hysterically and erotically, without either of us quite knowing how it had happened.
I had thirsted for her lithe, sweet figure and the caressing of her golden hair so long that I was swept away and found myself murmuring:
“I have not given you up, Sibella.”
She hardly gathered what I meant, and I put her arms round my neck. Her mouth had always been to my mind her chief charm, and when I found my lips pressed against its large, sweet lines—which should have ciphered a broad, generous nature—I lost my head—that is, if I had had any desire to keep it.
Old Mr. and Mrs. Hallward dozed away in their armchairs by the drawing-room fire. Miss Hallward was writing her interminable Sunday letters in the library. I have no doubt the house outside looked just as respectable and unemotional to Grahame when he returned to it as when he went out of it, but, all the same, I was wondering when he rejoined us if Sibella would think it necessary to break off her marriage at the last moment rather than marry a man she had betrayed. She might do so, although in my wildest delirium I had kept some vague powers of caution and calculation, and had concluded that morality with Sibella meant self-interest.