When Mr. Wylie, the pamphleteer, left Gabriel Cassilis, the latter resumed with undisturbed countenance his previous occupation of reading the letters and telegrams he had laid aside. Among them was one which he took up gingerly, as if it were a torpedo.
"Pshaw!" he cried impatiently, tossing it from him. "Another of those anonymous letters. The third." He looked at it with disgust, and then half involuntarily his hand reached out and took it up again. "The third, and all in the same handwriting. 'I have written you two letters, and you have taken no notice. This is the third. Beware! Your wife was with Mr. Colquhoun yesterday; she will be with him again to-day and to-morrow. Ask her, if you dare, what is her secret with him. Ask him what hold he has over her. Watch her, and caution her lest something evil befall you.—Your well-wisher.'
"I am a fool," he said, "to be disquieted about an anonymous slander. What does it matter to me? As if Victoria—she did know Colquhoun before her marriage—their names were mentioned—I remember hearing that there had been flirtation—flirtation! As if Victoria could ever flirt! She was no frivolous silly girl. No one who knows Victoria could for a moment suspect—suspect! The word is intolerable. One would say I was jealous."
He pushed forward his papers and leaned back in his chair, casting his thoughts behind him to the days of his stiff and formal wooing. He remembered how he said, sitting opposite to her in her cousin's drawing-room—there was no wandering by the river-bank or in pleasant gardens on summer evenings for those two lovers—
"You bring me fewer springs than I can offer you, Victoria;" which was his pretty poetical way of telling her that he was nearly forty years older than herself: "but we shall begin life with no trammels of previous attachments on either hand."
He called it—and thought it—at sixty-five, beginning life; and it was quite true that he had never before conceived an attachment for any woman.
"No, Mr. Cassilis," she replied; "we are both free, quite free; and the disparity of age is only a disadvantage on my side, which a few years will remedy."
This cold stately woman conducting a flirtation before her marriage? This Juno among young matrons causing a scandal after her marriage? It was ridiculous.
He said to himself that it was ridiculous so often, that he succeeded at last in persuading himself that it really was. And when he had quite done that, he folded up the anonymous document, docketed it, and placed it in one of the numerous pigeon-holes of his desk, which was one of those which shut up completely, covering over papers, pigeon-holes, and everything.
Then he addressed himself again to business, and, but for an occasional twinge of uneasiness, like the first throb which presages the coming gout, he got through an important day's work with his accustomed ease and power.